Poetry audiobooks

Nikki Giovanni: Love Poems & A Good Cry

By: Nikki Giovanni

Narrated by: Nikki Giovanni

Length: 2 hours 42 minutes

Abridged: No

Hear Nikki Giovanni read two extraordinary collections of her own work! A singular listening experience! The poetry of Nikki Giovanni has spurred movements, turned hearts and informed generations. She’s been hailed as a firebrand, a radical, a healer, and a sage; a wise and courageous voice who has touched our national consciousness.Love Poems:... Read more

Time Is a Mother

By: Ocean Vuong

Narrated by: Ocean Vuong

Length: 1 hour 43 minutes

Abridged: No

"Take your time with these poems, and return to them often.” —The Washington Post

The New York Times-bestselling collection of poems from the award-winning writer Ocean Vuong

How else do we return to ourselves but to fold
The page so it points to the good part
 
In this deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among... Read more

The Odyssey

By: Homer

Narrated by: Ian McKellen

Length: 13 hours 2 minutes

Abridged: No

The Odyssey is literature's grandest evocation of every man's journey through life. In the myths and legends that are retold here, the energy and poetry of Homer's original is captured in a bold, contemporary idiom, giving us an edition of The Odyssey that is a joy to listen to, worth savoring treasuring for its sheer lyrical mastery. This... Read more

At Blackwater Pond

By: Mary Oliver

Narrated by: Mary Oliver

Length: 1 hour

Abridged: No

Mary Oliver has published twenty-one volumes of poetry and six books of prose in the span of five decades, but she rarely performs her poetry in live readings. With At Blackwater Pond, Mary Oliver gives her audience what they've longed to hear: the poet's voice reading her own work. In this audio, she has recorded forty of her favorite poems,... Read more

Beowulf: A New Translation

By: Maria Dahvana Headley

Narrated by: JD Jackson & Maria Dahvana Headley

Length: 4 hours 8 minutes

Abridged: No

"Narrator JD Jackson addresses his listener as "bro" in this decidedly contemporary retelling of the classic saga...His brilliant performance captures all the artistry, wit, and immediacy of this fresh translation, and breathes new life into what for most has been a literary fossil." -- AudioFile Magazine, Earphones Award winner

A new,... Read more

Any Man

By: Amber Tamblyn

Narrated by: Glenn Davis, Ben Foster, Marc Maron, Jason Ritt...

Length: 4 hours 33 minutes

Abridged: No

In this electric and provocative debut novel, Tamblyn blends genres of poetry, prose, and elements of suspense to give shape to the shocking narratives of victims of sexual violence, mapping the destructive ways in which our society perpetuates rape culture, brilliantly brought to life through a multi-voice performance featuring Glenn Davis, Ben... Read more

BLUFF

By: Danez Smith

Narrated by: Danez Smith

Length: 2 hours 28 minutes

Abridged: No

Written after two years of artistic silence, during which the world came to a halt due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Minneapolis became the epicenter of protest following the murder of George Floyd, Bluff is Danez Smith's powerful reckoning with their role and responsibility as a poet and with their hometown of the Twin Cities. This is a book of... Read more

A Poetry Handbook

By: Mary Oliver

Narrated by: Kimberly Farr

Length: 3 hours 33 minutes

Abridged: No

“Mary Oliver would probably never admit to anything so grandiose as an effort to connect the conscious mind and the heart (that’s what she says poetry can do), but that is exactly what she accomplishes in this stunning little handbook.”—Los Angeles TimesFrom the beloved, legendary poet, the ultimate guide to writing and understanding poetry.With... Read more

The Canterbury Tales

By: Geoffrey Chaucer

Narrated by: Daniel Weyman, Derek Jacobi, Jay Bernard, Lesle...

Length: 16 hours 44 minutes

Abridged: No

Brought to you by Penguin.

This Penguin Classic is performed by Lesley Manville (winner of the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actress and known for Phantom Thread and Mum), Derek Jacobi (winner of the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor and known for Gladiator and Gosford Park), Michael Balogun (known for National Theatre Live: Macbeth), Jay... Read more

The Carrying

By: Ada Limón

Narrated by: Ada Limón

Length: 1 hour 39 minutes

Abridged: No

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDFINALIST FOR THE PEN/JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARDFrom U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón comes The Carrying—her most powerful collection yet.
Vulnerable, tender, acute, these are serious poems, brave poems, exploring with honesty the ambiguous moment between the rapture of youth and the grace of acceptance. A... Read more

The Sun and Her Flowers

By: Rupi Kaur

Narrated by: Rupi Kaur

Length: 2 hours 6 minutes

Abridged: No

Rupi Kaur performs the first-ever recording of the sun and her flowers, her second #1 New York Times bestselling collection of poetry and prose. This production was recorded in 2021 along with the brand-new audio edition of milk and honey and the debut audio recording of home body.

Divided into five chapters, this volume is a journey through the... Read more

The Mahabharata

By: Vyasa

Narrated by: Shaheen Khan & Sagar Arya

Length: 44 hours 7 minutes

Abridged: No

Brought to you by Penguin.

This Penguin Classic is performed by Shaheen Khan. This definitive recording includes an introduction by J. D. Smith, read by Sagar Arya.

The Mahabharata is one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India. It is of immense importance to the culture of the Indian subcontinent, and is a major text of Hinduism. Its... Read more

A Bit Much

By: Lyndsay Rush

Narrated by: Lyndsay Rush

Length: 1 hour 46 minutes

Abridged: No

This program is read by the author.

The debut poetry collection from Lyndsay Rush (aka @maryoliversdrunkcousin) is a humorous and joyful celebration of big feelings, tender truths, and hard-won wisdom, for fans of Maggie Smith, Kate Baer, and Kate Kennedy.

At long last, a book of poetry for people who didn’t even know they liked poetry. And... Read more

The Iliad

By: Homer & Caroline Alexander

Narrated by: Dominic Keating

Length: 19 hours 46 minutes

Abridged: No

With her virtuoso translation, classicist and bestselling author Caroline Alexander brings to life Homer’s timeless epic of the Trojan WarComposed around 730 B.C., Homer’s Iliad recounts the events of a few momentous weeks in the protracted ten-year war between the invading Achaeans, or Greeks, and the Trojans in their besieged city of Ilion.... Read more

Storyteller

By: Leslie Marmon Silko

Narrated by: Tara Gatewood

Length: 6 hours 34 minutes

Abridged: No

"A rich, many-faceted book." -- The New York Times

A classic work of Native American literature by the bestselling author of Ceremony

Leslie Marmon Silko's groundbreaking book Storyteller, first published in 1981, blends original short stories and poetry influenced by the traditional oral tales that she heard growing up on the Laguna Pueblo in New... Read more

How to Be a Good Savage and Other Poems

By: Mikeas Sánchez

Narrated by: Mikeas Sánchez, Wendy Call & Shook

Length: 3 hours 47 minutes

Abridged: No

The latest in the Seedbank series, the debut in English of a groundbreaking Indigenous poet of the Americas.In a fiercely personal yet authoritative voice, prolific contemporary poet Mikeas Sánchez explores the worldview of the Zoque people of southern Mexico. Her paced, steely lyrics fuse cosmology, lineage, feminism, and environmental activism... Read more

The Hurting Kind

By: Ada Limón

Narrated by: Ada Limón

Length: 1 hour 41 minutes

Abridged: No

An astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves—from National Book Critics Circle Award winner, National Book Award finalist and U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón.“I have always been too sensitive, a weeper / from a long line of weepers,” writes Limón. “I am the hurting kind.” What does it... Read more

A Fortune For Your Disaster

By: Hanif Abdurraqib

Narrated by: Hanif Abdurraqib

Length: 1 hour 36 minutes

Abridged: No

In his much-anticipated follow-up to The Crown Ain't Worth Much, poet, essayist, biographer, and music critic Hanif Abdurraqib has written a book of poems about how one rebuilds oneself after a heartbreak, the kind that renders them a different version of themselves than the one they knew. It's a book about a mother's death, and admitting that... Read more

Life on Mars

By: Tracy K. Smith

Narrated by: Tracy K. Smith

Length: 1 hour 22 minutes

Abridged: No

In these brilliant new poems, Tracy K. Smith envisions a sci-fi future sucked clean of any real dangers, contemplates the dark matter that keeps people both close and distant, and revisits the kitschy concepts like "love" and "illness" now relegated to the Museum of Obsolescence. These poems reveal the realities of life lived here, on the... Read more

Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude

By: Ross Gay

Narrated by: Ross Gay

Length: TBA

Abridged: No

Winner, 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award, poetry category
Winner, 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize
Finalist, 2015 National Book Award, poetry category
Finalist, 2015 NAACP Image Awards, poetry category

Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude is a sustained meditation on that which goes away—loved ones, the seasons, the earth as we know it—that... Read more

Couplets

By: Maggie Millner

Narrated by: Maggie Millner

Length: 1 hour 29 minutes

Abridged: No

A dazzling love story in poems about one woman’s coming-out, coming-of-age, and coming undone.A woman lives an ordinary life in Brooklyn. She has a boyfriend. They share a cat. She writes poems in the prevailing style. She also has dreams: of being seduced by a throng of older women, of kissing a friend in a dorm-room closet. But the dreams are... Read more

The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On

By: Franny Choi

Narrated by: Franny Choi

Length: 1 hour 59 minutes

Abridged: No

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,... Read more

When the Dark Spoke to Me

By: Christabelle Marbun

Narrated by: Christabelle Marbun

Length: 1 hour 11 minutes

Abridged: No

A profound poetry collection shrouded in tenderness and empathy, created to comfort the growing pains we all experience in life.
Teen breakout poet Christabelle Grace Marbun brings her latest collection When the Dark Spoke to Me to life through words wise beyond her years. Her uniquely positive perspective on life, death, and everything in... Read more

Goldenrod

By: Maggie Smith

Narrated by: Maggie Smith

Length: 1 hour 5 minutes

Abridged: No

NATIONAL BESTSELLER * NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR

“To read Maggie Smith is to embrace the achingly precious beauty of the present moment.” —Time
“A captivating collection from a wise, accessible poet.” —People

From the award-winning poet and bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Keep Moving, and Good Bones, a... Read more