Listen to Trending Full Audiobooks in Literature, Poetry

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/569514 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness

Author: Robin Coste Lewis

Narrator: Robin Coste Lewis

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 1 hour 24 minutes

Release date: October 1, 2024

Genres: Poetry

Publisher's Summary:

A genre-bending exploration of poetry and human migration—another revelatory expedition from the National Book Award–winning poet who changed the way we see art, the museum, and the Black female figure. • Winner of the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Twenty-five years ago, after her maternal grandmother’s death, Robin Coste Lewis discovered a stunning collection of photographs in an old suitcase under her bed, filled with everything from sepia tintypes to Technicolor Polaroids. Lewis’s family had survived one of the largest migrations in human history, when six million Americans fled the South, attempting to escape from white supremacy and white terrorism. But these photographs of daily twentieth-century Black life revealed a concealed, interior history. The poetry Lewis was inspired to create stands forth as an inspiring alternative to the usual ways we frame the old stories of “race” and “migration,” placing them within a much vaster span of time and history. In what she calls “an origin myth for the future,” Lewis reverses our expectations of poetry: “Black pages, black space, black time––the Big Black Bang.” From glamorous outings to graduations, birth announcements, baseball leagues, and back-porch delight, Lewis creates a lyrical documentary about Black intimacy. Instead of colonial nostalgia, she offers us “an exalted Black privacy.” What emerges is a dynamic reframing of what it means to be human and alive, with Blackness at its center. “I am trying / to make the gods / happy,” she writes. “I am trying to make the dead / clap and shout.”

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/557781 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: [Russian] - The Hooligan's Confession (Russian Edition)

Author: Sergey Esenin

Narrator: Tim Mirkin

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 0 hours 7 minutes

Release date: March 4, 2023

Genres: Poetry

Publisher's Summary:

Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin is a Russian poet and writer. One of the largest personalities of the Silver Age. A representative of the new peasant poetry and lyrics, and in a later period of creativity - Imagism. Hooligan's Confession is one of his most complex and deepest poems. Reading artist Tim Mirkin Please note: This audiobook is in Russian

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/575816 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Musical Tables: Poems

Author: Billy Collins

Narrator: Billy Collins

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 0 hours 39 minutes

Release date: November 15, 2022

Genres: Poetry

Publisher's Summary:

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the former United States Poet Laureate and New York Times bestselling author of Aimless Love, a collection of more than 125 small poems, all of them new, and each a thought or observation compressed to its emotional essence “Whenever I pick up a new book of poems, I flip through the pages looking for small ones. Just as I might have trust in an abstract painter more if I knew he or she could draw a credible chicken, I have faith in poets who can go short.”—Billy Collins You can spot a Billy Collins poem immediately. The amiable voice, the light touch, the sudden turn at the end. He 'puts the ‘fun’  back in profundity,” says poet Alice Fulton. In his own words, his poems tend to “begin in Kansas and end in Oz.” Now “America’s favorite poet” (The Wall Street Journal) has found a new form for his unique poetic style: the small poem. Here Collins writes about his trademark themes of nature, animals, poetry, mortality, absurdity, and love—all in a handful of lines. Neither haiku nor limerick, the small poem pushes to an extreme poetry’s famed power to condense emotional and conceptual meaning. Inspired by the small poetry of writers as diverse as William Carlos Williams, W.S. Merwin, Kay Ryan, and Charles Simic, and written with Collins’s recognizable wit and wisdom, the poems of Musical Tables show one of our greatest poets channeling his unique voice into a new phase of his exceptional career. 3:00 AM Only my hand is asleep, but it’s a start.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/573778 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: And Yet: Poems

Author: Kate Baer

Narrator: Kate Baer

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 0 hours 55 minutes

Release date: November 8, 2022

Genres: Poetry

Publisher's Summary:

The second full length poetry collection from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of What Kind of Woman. Kate Baer shot into the literary stratosphere with the publication of her debut poetry collection, What Kind of Woman, which became an instant #1 New York Times bestseller. Kate’s second full-length book of traditional poetry, And Yet, dives deeper into the themes that are the hallmarks of her writing: motherhood, friendship, love, and loss. Taken together, these poems demonstrate the remarkable evolution of a writer working at the height of her craft, pushing herself and her poetry in a beautiful and impressive way. Intimate, evocative, and bold, Kate’s beguiling poetry firmly positions her in the company of Dorianne Laux, Mary Oliver, Maggie Nelson, and other great female poets of our time.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/567325 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On

Author: Franny Choi

Narrator: Franny Choi

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 1 hour 59 minutes

Release date: November 1, 2022

Genres: Poetry

Publisher's Summary:

From acclaimed poet Franny Choi comes a poetry collection for the ends of worlds—past, present, and future. Choi’s third book features poems about historical and impending apocalypses, alongside musings on our responsibilities to each other and visions for our collective survival. Many have called our time dystopian. But The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On reminds us that apocalypse has already come in myriad ways for marginalized peoples. With lyric and tonal dexterity, these poems spin backwards and forwards in time--from Korean comfort women during World War II, to the precipice of climate crisis, to children wandering a museum in the future. These poems explore narrative distances and queer linearity, investigating on microscopic scales before soaring towards the universal. As she wrestles with the daily griefs and distances of this apocalyptic world, Choi also imagines what togetherness--between Black and Asian and other marginalized communities, between living organisms, between children of calamity and conquest--could look like. Bringing together Choi's signature speculative imagination with even greater musicality than her previous work, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On ultimately charts new paths toward hope in the aftermaths, and visions for our collective survival.  Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/584572 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Scars and Stars

Author: Jesse Thistle

Narrator: Jesse Thistle

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 2 hours 43 minutes

Release date: October 18, 2022

Genres: Poetry

Publisher's Summary:

A beautiful and moving collection of poems and stories from the author of the #1 bestselling memoir From the Ashes. Fans of Jesse Thistle’s extraordinary debut From the Ashes have already had the pleasure of reading his poetry, which is sprinkled throughout this bestselling memoir. In Scars and Stars, he digs deeper into the poetic form, which is especially close to his heart.   Charting his own history, the stories of people from his past, the burning intensity of new and unexpected love, the complex legacies of family and community, and the beauty of parenthood, this collection is a profound mediation that expands his engagement with the ideas and experiences that have shaped his body of work thus far.   Throughout the collection, prose pieces complement the poems, and to bring readers into Jesse’s life with greater intimacy than ever before. The result is an unforgettable furthering of his singular story, one that is sure to delight his many readers, but also serve as a perfect entry point for those new to the work of one of our most thrilling and honest writers.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/568923 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Harbinger: Poems

Author: Shelley Puhak

Narrator: Shelley Puhak

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 0 hours 53 minutes

Release date: October 18, 2022

Genres: Poetry

Publisher's Summary:

“The speaker in Shelley Puhak’s Harbinger is no closer to knowing herself than I am, than we are, which is why we trust her. Each similarly titled poem holds a triptych mirror up to the artist and, in so doing, up to us all, so we may better see ourselves as we are. In ever-changing form.” —Nicole Sealey  A stunning meditation on artistic creation and historical memory from the winner of the National Poetry Series, chosen by Nicole Sealey From “Portrait of the artist, gaslit” to “Portrait of the artist’s ancestors” to “Portrait of the artist reading a newspaper,” the poems in Harbinger reflect the many facets of the artistic self as well as the myriad influences and experiences that contribute to that identity. “Portrait of the artist as a young man” has long been the default position, but these poems carve out a different vantage point. Seen through the lens of motherhood, of working as a waitress, of watching election results come in, or of simply sitting in a waiting room, making art—and making an artist—is a process wherein historical events collide with lived experience, both deeply personal but also unfailingly political. When we make art, for what (and to whom) are we accountable? And what does art-making demand of us, especially as apocalypse looms? With its surprising insights, Harbinger, the latest book from acclaimed poet Shelley Puhak, shows us the reality of the constantly evolving and unstable self, a portrait of the artist as fragmentary, impressionable, and always in flux.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/569460 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Symmetry of Fish

Author: Su Cho

Narrator: Su Cho

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 1 hour 1 minute

Release date: October 11, 2022

Genres: Poetry

Publisher's Summary:

“All hits no skips. I was incredibly moved by these poems.” —Roxane Gay, via Goodreads From National Poetry Series winner Su Cho, chosen by Paige Lewis, a debut poetry collection about immigration, memory, and a family’s lexicon Language and lore are at the core of The Symmetry of Fish, a moving debut about coming-of-age in the middle of nowhere. With striking and tender insight, it seeks to give voice to those who have been denied their stories, and examines the way phrases and narratives are passed down through immigrant families—not diluted over time, but distilled into potency over generations. In this way, a family's language is not lost but continuously remade, hitched to new associations, and capable of blooming anew, with the power to cut across space and time to unearth buried memories. The poems in The Symmetry of Fish insist that language is first and foremost a bodily act; even if our minds can't recall a word or a definition, if we trust our mouths, expression will find us—though never quite in the forms we expect.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/568883 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Balladz

Author: Sharon Olds

Narrator: Sharon Olds

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 3 hours 33 minutes

Release date: October 4, 2022

Genres: Poetry

Publisher's Summary:

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • Songs from our era of communal grief and reckoning—by the Pulitzer Prize and T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry winner, called 'a poet for these times, a powerful woman who won’t back down' (San Francisco Chronicle). 'At the time of have-not, I look at myself in this mirror,' writes Olds in this self-scouring, exhilarating volume, which opens with a section of quarantine poems, and at its center boasts what she calls Amherst Balladz (whose syntax honors Emily Dickinson: 'she was our Girl - our Woman - / Man enough - for me') and many more in her own contemporary, long-flowing-sentence rhythm. Olds sings of her childhood, young womanhood, and maturity all mixed up together, seeing an early lover in the one who is about to buried; seeing her whiteness, seeing her privilege; seeing her mother (whom her readers will recognize) 'flushed exalted at Punishment time'; seeing how we've spoiled the earth but carrying a stray indoor spider carefully back out to the garden. It is Olds's gift to us that in the richly detailed exposure of her sorrows she can still elegize songbirds, her true kin, and write that heaven comes here in life, not after it.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/569480 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Study of Human Life

Author: Joshua Bennett

Narrator: Joshua Bennett

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 2 hours 8 minutes

Release date: September 20, 2022

Genres: Poetry

Publisher's Summary:

Winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize, and longlisted for the Griffin Prize and the Massachusetts Book Award An acclaimed poet further extends his range into the realm of speculative fiction, while addressing issues as varied as abolition, Black ecological consciousness, and the boundless promise of parenthood Featuring the novella “The Book of Mycah,” soon to be adapted by Lena Waithe’s Hillman Grad Productions & Warner Bros. TV Across three sequences, Joshua Bennett’s new book recalls and reimagines social worlds almost but not entirely lost, all while gesturing toward the ones we are building even now, in the midst of a state of emergency, together. Bennett opens with a set of autobiographical poems that deal with themes of family, life, death, vulnerability, and the joys and dreams of youth. The central section, “The Book of Mycah,” features an alternate history where Malcolm X is resurrected from the dead, as is a young black man shot by the police some fifty years later in Brooklyn. The final section of The Study of Human Life are poems that Bennett has written about fatherhood, on the heels of his own first child being born last fall.