-
Balladz
- Narrated by: Sharon Olds
- Length: 3 hrs and 33 mins
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
![Prime logo](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/G/01/Audible/Homestead/Prime_Logo_RGB.png)
Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Buy for $11.25
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Great first listens
![The Housemaid Audiobook By Freida McFadden cover art](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51+UxIo+YNL._SL240_.jpg)
![Listen for the Lie Audiobook By Amy Tintera cover art](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51zllGBPiuL._SL240_.jpg)
![Project Hail Mary Audiobook By Andy Weir cover art](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51b6fvQr1-L._SL240_.jpg)
![The Housemaid's Secret Audiobook By Freida McFadden cover art](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51WR3i5EfIL._SL240_.jpg)
![Kingdom of Ash Audiobook By Sarah J. Maas cover art](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51r5TOoIdRL._SL240_.jpg)
![Tower of Dawn Audiobook By Sarah J. Maas cover art](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51JhJaNpMWL._SL240_.jpg)
![A Court of Thorns and Roses (Part 2 of 2) (Dramatized Adaptation) Audiobook By Sarah J. Maas cover art](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51vJxchNsxL._SL240_.jpg)
![Verity Audiobook By Colleen Hoover cover art](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/511i1nvprYL._SL240_.jpg)
![The Duke and I Audiobook By Julia Quinn cover art](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51XnZ3udYnL._SL240_.jpg)
![The Nightingale Audiobook By Kristin Hannah cover art](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51lJVAGTuNL._SL240_.jpg)
![Words of Radiance Audiobook By Brandon Sanderson cover art](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51yEEt2q0vL._SL240_.jpg)
![The Way of Kings Audiobook By Brandon Sanderson cover art](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51hAwcG3oNL._SL240_.jpg)
![An Offer from a Gentleman Audiobook By Julia Quinn cover art](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51qhFc8LJqL._SL240_.jpg)
![The Final Empire Audiobook By Brandon Sanderson cover art](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61rYqiz8yJL._SL240_.jpg)
![The Inmate Audiobook By Freida McFadden cover art](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51ORE1dbOaL._SL240_.jpg)
![The Idea of You Audiobook By Robinne Lee cover art](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41-CB3k8DrL._SL240_.jpg)
![Fourth Wing (Part 1 of 2) (Dramatized Adaptation) Audiobook By Rebecca Yarros cover art](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61i95pK0DoL._SL240_.jpg)
![James Audiobook By Percival Everett cover art](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/31FeDPikCWL._SL240_.jpg)
![The Serpent and the Wings of Night Audiobook By Carissa Broadbent cover art](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61VDeWSV8iL._SL240_.jpg)
![The Perfect Son Audiobook By Freida McFadden cover art](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/510Bt0n2r-L._SL240_.jpg)
![The Viscount Who Loved Me Audiobook By Julia Quinn cover art](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/515SoOHheML._SL240_.jpg)
![Break Me Audiobook By K. A. Tucker cover art](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/512TJtt1MlL._SL240_.jpg)
![The Well of Ascension Audiobook By Brandon Sanderson cover art](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61jTUT0xfCL._SL240_.jpg)
![We Are Legion (We Are Bob) Audiobook By Dennis E. Taylor cover art](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51rt2pFIW7L._SL240_.jpg)
![Oathbringer Audiobook By Brandon Sanderson cover art](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51fKpuTPMdL._SL240_.jpg)
![Surrender to Me Audiobook By K. A. Tucker cover art](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41evKhKhGuL._SL240_.jpg)
![The Great Alone Audiobook By Kristin Hannah cover art](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51NeDaxcJwL._SL240_.jpg)
![The Hero of Ages Audiobook By Brandon Sanderson cover art](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/611IBQxExyL._SL240_.jpg)
![The Mountain Is You Audiobook By Brianna Wiest cover art](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41jiySKmibL._SL240_.jpg)
![Dawnshard Audiobook By Brandon Sanderson cover art](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51oUwcEc9UL._SL240_.jpg)
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 fans 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.
Critic reviews
GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE FINALIST
“A commanding poet . . . This substantial gathering is funny, furious, discomfiting, ravishing, mythic, and sorrowful . . . As always, Olds describes herself and her loved ones in startlingly microscopic detail, finding beauty in the ravages of age and even death . . . Passionately precise, Olds unites the primordial with the scientific, the mundane with the chthonic, flesh with spirit.”—Donna Seaman, Booklist
“A gorgeous, introspective collection. Beginning with a series of quarantine poems, she also meditates on her own white privilege, on her mother’s abuse, and on aging, among other subjects. At once personal and political, the book perfectly encapsulates this confounding time.”—Columbia Magazine
“Ranging from quarantine to issues of whiteness, the Pulitzer and T.S. Eliot Prize-winning Olds continues her laserlike attentiveness to the life around her life as she crisscrosses childhood, young adulthood, and contemporary times, sometimes in the style of Emily Dickinson.”—Library Journal
Related to this topic
-
Good Poems
- Selected and Introduced by Garrison Keillor
- By: Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, and others
- Narrated by: Garrison Keillor
- Length: 4 hrs and 23 mins
- Abridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Good Poems includes poems about lovers, children, failure, everyday life, death, and transcendence. It features the work of classic poets, such as Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Robert Frost, as well as the work of contemporary greats such as Howard Nemerov, Charles Bukowski, Donald Hall, Billy Collins, Robert Bly, and Sharon Olds Good Poems includes poems about lovers, children, failure, everyday life, death, and transcendence.
-
-
Very good, but. . .
- By KSmith on 01-27-11
By: Emily Dickinson, and others
-
Palimpsest
- By: Catherynne M. Valente
- Narrated by: Aasne Vigesaa
- Length: 11 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Between life and death, dreaming and waking, at the train stop beyond the end of the world is the city of Palimpsest. To get there is a miracle, a mystery, a gift, and a curse - a voyage permitted only to those who’ve always believed there’s another world than the one that meets the eye. Those fated to make the passage are marked forever by a map of that wondrous city tattooed on their flesh after a single orgasmic night. To this kingdom of ghost trains, lion-priests, living kanji, and cream-filled canals come four travelers.
-
-
Excellent Prose, but lacks maturity
- By Michael on 08-09-15
-
Arcadia
- By: Lauren Groff
- Narrated by: Andrew Garman
- Length: 11 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Lauren Groff’s acclaimed debut novel The Monsters of Templeton was short-listed for the Orange Prize. Her second novel, Arcadia opens in the late 1960s with a group of young idealists forming a commune in western New York State. Into this group is born Bit, who grows into a quiet, distant man. Over the course of 50 years, Bit witnesses the utopia crumble and the world change in unimaginable ways.
-
-
Luscious prose, intimate and realistic
- By Kathleen on 03-22-12
By: Lauren Groff
-
She Walks in Beauty
- A Woman's Journey Through Poems
- By: Adrienne Rich, Pablo Neruda, Elizabeth Bishop, and others
- Narrated by: John Bedford Lloyd, Campbell Scott, Jane Alexander, and others
- Length: 5 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
She Walks in Beauty draws on poetry’s eloquent wisdom to ponder the many joys and challenges of being a woman. Caroline Kennedy has divided the collection into sections that signify to her the most notable milestones, passages, and universal experiences in a woman’s life, and she begins each of these sections with an introduction in which she explores and celebrates the most important elements of life’s journey.
-
-
Still struggling with poetry
- By Beatrice on 01-30-12
By: Adrienne Rich, and others
-
Sula
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 5 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Nel and Sula's devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the black community and Sula has become a pariah. But their friendship ends in an unforgivable betrayal—or does it end? Terrifying, comic, ribald and tragic, Sula is a work that overflows with life.
-
-
Good against evil and a riotous story to boot
- By Karen on 04-11-11
By: Toni Morrison
-
The Plague of Doves
- By: Louise Erdrich
- Narrated by: Peter Francis James, Kathleen McInerney
- Length: 11 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The unsolved murder of a farm family haunts the small, white, off-reservation town of Pluto, North Dakota. The vengeance exacted for this crime and the subsequent distortions of truth transform the lives of Ojibwe living on the nearby reservation and shape the passions of both communities for the next generation.
-
-
Avoid this Plague
- By Andre on 05-16-08
By: Louise Erdrich
-
Good Poems
- Selected and Introduced by Garrison Keillor
- By: Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, and others
- Narrated by: Garrison Keillor
- Length: 4 hrs and 23 mins
- Abridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Good Poems includes poems about lovers, children, failure, everyday life, death, and transcendence. It features the work of classic poets, such as Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Robert Frost, as well as the work of contemporary greats such as Howard Nemerov, Charles Bukowski, Donald Hall, Billy Collins, Robert Bly, and Sharon Olds Good Poems includes poems about lovers, children, failure, everyday life, death, and transcendence.
-
-
Very good, but. . .
- By KSmith on 01-27-11
By: Emily Dickinson, and others
-
Palimpsest
- By: Catherynne M. Valente
- Narrated by: Aasne Vigesaa
- Length: 11 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Between life and death, dreaming and waking, at the train stop beyond the end of the world is the city of Palimpsest. To get there is a miracle, a mystery, a gift, and a curse - a voyage permitted only to those who’ve always believed there’s another world than the one that meets the eye. Those fated to make the passage are marked forever by a map of that wondrous city tattooed on their flesh after a single orgasmic night. To this kingdom of ghost trains, lion-priests, living kanji, and cream-filled canals come four travelers.
-
-
Excellent Prose, but lacks maturity
- By Michael on 08-09-15
-
Arcadia
- By: Lauren Groff
- Narrated by: Andrew Garman
- Length: 11 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Lauren Groff’s acclaimed debut novel The Monsters of Templeton was short-listed for the Orange Prize. Her second novel, Arcadia opens in the late 1960s with a group of young idealists forming a commune in western New York State. Into this group is born Bit, who grows into a quiet, distant man. Over the course of 50 years, Bit witnesses the utopia crumble and the world change in unimaginable ways.
-
-
Luscious prose, intimate and realistic
- By Kathleen on 03-22-12
By: Lauren Groff
-
She Walks in Beauty
- A Woman's Journey Through Poems
- By: Adrienne Rich, Pablo Neruda, Elizabeth Bishop, and others
- Narrated by: John Bedford Lloyd, Campbell Scott, Jane Alexander, and others
- Length: 5 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
She Walks in Beauty draws on poetry’s eloquent wisdom to ponder the many joys and challenges of being a woman. Caroline Kennedy has divided the collection into sections that signify to her the most notable milestones, passages, and universal experiences in a woman’s life, and she begins each of these sections with an introduction in which she explores and celebrates the most important elements of life’s journey.
-
-
Still struggling with poetry
- By Beatrice on 01-30-12
By: Adrienne Rich, and others
-
Sula
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 5 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Nel and Sula's devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the black community and Sula has become a pariah. But their friendship ends in an unforgivable betrayal—or does it end? Terrifying, comic, ribald and tragic, Sula is a work that overflows with life.
-
-
Good against evil and a riotous story to boot
- By Karen on 04-11-11
By: Toni Morrison
-
The Plague of Doves
- By: Louise Erdrich
- Narrated by: Peter Francis James, Kathleen McInerney
- Length: 11 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The unsolved murder of a farm family haunts the small, white, off-reservation town of Pluto, North Dakota. The vengeance exacted for this crime and the subsequent distortions of truth transform the lives of Ojibwe living on the nearby reservation and shape the passions of both communities for the next generation.
-
-
Avoid this Plague
- By Andre on 05-16-08
By: Louise Erdrich
-
Other Voices, Other Rooms
- By: Truman Capote
- Narrated by: Cody Roberts
- Length: 6 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
At the age of 12, Joel Knox is summoned to meet the father who abandoned him at birth. But when Joel arrives at the decaying mansion in Skully's Landing, his father is nowhere in sight. What he finds instead is a sullen stepmother who delights in killing birds; an uncle with the face - and heart - of a debauched child; and a fearsome little girl named Idabel who may offer him the closest thing he has ever known to love.
-
-
Capote’s coming of age story
- By Daniel Diffin on 11-08-23
By: Truman Capote
-
Vampires in the Lemon Grove
- Stories
- By: Karen Russell
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey, Joy Osmanski, Kaleo Griffith, and others
- Length: 9 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the collection's marvelous title story, two aging vampires in a sun-drenched Italian lemon grove find their hundred-year marriage tested when one of them develops a fear of flying. In "The Seagull Army Descends on Strong Beach, 1979", a dejected teenager discovers that the universe is communicating with him through talismanic objects left in a seagull's nest. "Proving Up" and "The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis" find Russell veering into more sinister territory.
-
-
Stylish modern magic realism
- By Ryan on 04-10-13
By: Karen Russell
-
Her Body and Other Parties
- Stories
- By: Carmen Maria Machado
- Narrated by: Amy Landon
- Length: 8 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies.
-
-
Beautiful
- By Anonymous User on 11-17-17
-
Priestdaddy
- A Memoir
- By: Patricia Lockwood
- Narrated by: Patricia Lockwood
- Length: 10 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Father Greg Lockwood is unlike any Catholic priest you have ever met - a man who lounges in boxer shorts, who loves action movies, and whose constant jamming on the guitar reverberates "like a whole band dying in a plane crash in 1972". His daughter is an irreverent poet who long ago left the church's country. When an unexpected crisis leads her and her husband to move back into her parents' rectory, their two worlds collide.
-
-
Terrible narration--read, don't listen
- By Penelope on 08-06-17
-
Jagannath
- By: Karin Tidbeck
- Narrated by: Kirsten Potter
- Length: 4 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A child is born in a tin can. A switchboard operator finds himself in hell. Three corpulent women float somewhere beyond time. Welcome to the weird world of Karin Tidbeck, the visionary Swedish author of literary sci-fi, speculative fiction, and mind-bending fantasy who has captivated fans around the world. Originally published by the tiny press Cheeky Frawg - the passion project of Ann and Jeff VanderMeer - Jagannath has been celebrated by listeners and critics alike, with rave reviews from major outlets and support from lauded peers like China Mieville and even Ursula K. Le Guin herself.
-
-
Always unique, usually quite good, sometimes meh
- By Eugene on 02-13-19
By: Karin Tidbeck
-
The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender
- By: Leslye Walton
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 8 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Magical realism, lyrical prose, and the pain and passion of human love haunt this hypnotic generational saga. Foolish love appears to be the Roux family birthright, an ominous forecast for its most recent progeny, Ava Lavender.
-
-
Beautiful and Haunting Fairytale
- By FanB14 on 07-24-15
By: Leslye Walton
-
Above Us Only Sky
- By: Michele Young-Stone
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 9 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Prudence Eleanor Vilkas was born with a pair of wings molded to her back. Considered a birth defect, her wings were surgically removed, leaving only the ghost of them behind. Growing up in Los Vientos, Florida, Prudence meets her long-estranged Lithuanian grandfather and discovers a miraculous lineage beating and pulsing with past Lithuanian bird-women.
-
-
I'm So Glad I Listened to It!
- By Elizabeth on 08-22-16
-
Battleborn
- By: Claire Vaye Watkins
- Narrated by: Ali Ahn, Morgan Hallett, Laura Knight Keating, and others
- Length: 8 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Like the work of Cormac McCarthy, Denis Johnson, Richard Ford, and Annie Proulx, Battleborn represents a near-perfect confluence of sensibility and setting, and the introduction of an exceptionally powerful and original literary voice. In each of these ten unforgettable stories, Claire Vaye Watkins writes her way fearlessly into the mythology of the American West, utterly reimagining it.
-
-
Wonderful magnificent stories beautifully told
- By Pedro Ramirez on 12-03-15
-
Owls Do Cry
- By: Janet Frame
- Narrated by: Heather Bolton
- Length: 8 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Owls Do Cry is Janet Frame's first novel. She describes her idea behind it in the second volume of her autobiography: 'Pictures of great treasure in the midst of sadness and waste haunted me and I began to think, in fiction, of a childhood, home life, hospital life, using people known to me as a base for main characters, and inventing minor characters.'
-
-
well told but a wee bit depressing.
- By Muzza on 11-03-19
By: Janet Frame
-
Without a Map
- A Memoir
- By: Meredith Hall
- Narrated by: Kathe Mazur
- Length: 9 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Meredith Hall's moving but unsentimental memoir begins in 1965, when she becomes pregnant at sixteen. Shunned by her insular New Hampshire community, she is then kicked out of the house by her mother. Her father and stepmother reluctantly take her in, hiding her before they finally banish her altogether. After giving her baby up for adoption, Hall wanders recklessly through the Middle East, where she survives by selling her possessions and finally her blood.
-
-
Not Your Average "16 and Pregnant"
- By Susie on 12-11-12
By: Meredith Hall
-
Promise
- A Novel
- By: Minrose Gwin
- Narrated by: Adenrele Ojo
- Length: 12 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the aftermath of a devastating tornado that rips through the town of Tupelo, Mississippi, at the height of the Great Depression, two women worlds apart - one Black, one White; one a great-grandmother, the other a teenager - fight for their families' survival in this lyrical and powerful novel.
-
-
Mostly Disappointing
- By Anjoli on 06-15-19
By: Minrose Gwin
-
White Dog Fell from the Sky
- By: Eleanor Morse
- Narrated by: Carla Mercer-Meyer
- Length: 14 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Botswana, 1976: Isaac Muthethe thinks he is dead. Smuggled across the border from South Africa in a hearse, he awakens covered in dust, staring at blue sky and the face of White Dog. Far from dead, he is, for the first time, in a country without apartheid. A medical student in South Africa, he was forced to flee after witnessing a friend murdered by white members of the South African Defense Force.
-
-
Unexpectedly Stunning Work!
- By Kathi on 03-15-13
By: Eleanor Morse
What listeners say about Balladz
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Profree 123
- 11-11-22
Intimate!
I feel as though I know her more than ever. Her voice is stronger than ever.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!