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Half-light
- Collected Poems 1965-2016
- Narrated by: Frank Bidart
- Length: 2 hrs and 35 mins
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Publisher's summary
This program is read by the author.
WINNER OF THE 2018 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY
WINNER OF THE 2017 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY
The collected works of one of contemporary poetry’s most original voices
Gathered together, the poems of Frank Bidart perform one of the most remarkable transmutations of the body into language in contemporary literature. His pages represent the human voice in all its extreme registers, whether it’s that of the child-murderer Herbert White, the obsessive anorexic Ellen West, the tormented genius Vaslav Nijinsky, or the poet’s own. And in that embodiment is a transgressive empathy, one that recognizes our wild appetites, the monsters, the misfits, the misunderstood among us and inside us. Few writers have so willingly ventured to the dark places of the human psyche and allowed themselves to be stripped bare on the page with such candor and vulnerability. Over the past half century, Bidart has done nothing less than invent a poetics commensurate with the chaos and appetites of our experience.
Half-light encompasses all of Bidart’s previous books, and also includes a new collection, Thirst, in which the poet austerely surveys his life, laying it plain for us before venturing into something new and unknown. Here Bidart finds himself a “Creature coterminous with thirst,” still longing, still searching in himself, one of the “queers of the universe.”
Visionary and revelatory, intimate and unguarded, Bidart’s Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2017 are a radical confrontation with human nature, a conflict eternally renewed and reframed, restless line by restless line.
Critic reviews
WINNER OF THE 2018 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY
WINNER OF THE 2017 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY
"[Frank Bidart's] poetry over five decades has volubly modeled a wholly new approach to autobiographical material, chiefly by giving voice to the inner travails of other people's lives, both real and imagined . . . The publication of Half-light: Collected Poems 1965–2016 gives readers a chance to see how Bidart, ill content merely to 'say what happened' in prefab stanzas, performs a poetry of 'embodiment' . . . Throughout his career, Bidart's self-devoting genius has been his ability to transform a poem into a vocalized (albeit anguished) performance of consciousness and moral interrogation, an occasion for metaphysical speculation as intense and oracular as any Shakespearean monologue or philosophical treatise . . . Sublime . . . Mesmerizing . . . " —Major Jackson, The New York Times Book Review
"Made up of the seventy-eight-year-old author’s eight previous volumes of verse and a new sequence—the bold and elegiac Thirst—Half-light is both the culmination of a distinguished career and a poetic ur-text about how homophobia, doubt, and a parent’s confusing love can shape a gay child . . . The collection is a fraught song of the self, composed of subtleties and exclamations . . . True emotion demands a dialogue, and, like James Merrill’s extraordinary work The Changing Light at Sandover, Bidart’s poems are a kind of séance, one in which he tries to invoke and communicate love, even if that love can no longer be achieved, tasted, seen, touched." —Hilton Als, The New Yorker
"Frank Bidart has long challenged readers—and convention—with a complexity and originality not often seen in American poetry. Now with Half-light: Collected Poems 1965–2016, readers can gain a deeper understanding of how Bidart’s writing works together to create a vast, manifold narrative . . . The book closes with an ambitious section of new writing that deals with mortality and remembered friendships, a fitting way to end this monumental work." —Elizabeth Lund, The Washington Post
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-
Story
Alone among the creatures of the world, man suffers a pang both bitter and sweet. It is an ache for the homecoming. The Greeks called it nostalgia. Post-modern man, homeless almost by definition, cannot understand nostalgia. If he is a progressive, dreaming of a utopia to come, he dismisses it contemptuously, eager to bury a past he despises. If he is a reactionary, he sentimentalizes it, dreaming of a lost golden age. In this profound reflection, Anthony Esolen explores the true meaning of nostalgia and its place in the human heart.
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Deep and thought provoking.
- By Holly Stockley on 04-24-19
By: Anthony Esolen
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The Empress
- A Novel
- By: Laura Martínez-Belli, Simon Bruni - translator
- Narrated by: Yareli Arizmendi
- Length: 13 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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It’s 1863. Napoleon III has installed a foreign monarch in Mexico to squash the current regime. Maximilian von Habsburg of Austria accepts the emperor’s crown. But it is his wife, the brilliant and ambitious Princess Charlotte, who throws herself passionately into the role. Known to the people as Empress Carlota, she rules deftly from behind the scenes while her husband contents himself with philandering and decorating the palace. But Carlota bears a guilty secret.
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The Empress of Mexico
- By Fran on 02-07-21
By: Laura Martínez-Belli, and others
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Oedipus the King
- By: Sophocles
- Narrated by: Michael Sheen, full cast
- Length: 1 hr and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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In the hands of Sophocles, the master dramatist, the anguished tale of a man fated to kill his father and marry his mother retains its power to shock and move beyond any Freudian reference.
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Great Production...Questionable Translation
- By Vanessa B. Lund on 01-17-13
By: Sophocles
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The Book of Disquiet
- By: Fernando Pessoa
- Narrated by: Adam Sims
- Length: 17 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Assembled from notes and jottings left unpublished at the time of the author’s death, The Book of Disquiet is a collection of aphoristic prose-poetry musings on dreams, solitude, time and memory. Credited to Pessoa’s alter ego, Bernardo Soares, who chronicles his contemplations in this so-called "factless" autobiography, the work is a journey of one man’s soul and, by extension, of all human souls that allow their minds and hearts to roam far and free.
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The book that saved my life
- By Hutchinson on 03-09-21
By: Fernando Pessoa
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Desire
- The Journey We Must Take to Find the Life God Offers
- By: John Eldredge
- Narrated by: Kelly Ryan Dolan
- Length: 6 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Sometimes it seems we just can't get what we want. Circumstances thwart our best-laid plans. We struggle to live a heartfelt life. Worst of all, says Eldredge, the modern church mistakenly teaches its people to kill desire (calling it sin) and replace it with duty or obligation (calling it sanctification).
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Nothing Less Than Life-Changing
- By Randall on 09-28-04
By: John Eldredge
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The Ground Beneath Her Feet
- By: Salman Rushdie
- Narrated by: Steven Crossley
- Length: 27 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Salman Rushdie is widely considered one of a handful of truly great living writers. The internationally acclaimed, Booker Prize-winning author's storytelling shines in this epic love story, a modern retelling of the myth of Orpheus.
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Okay, Salmon, We get that you're a genious already
- By Julie A Quinn on 04-23-09
By: Salman Rushdie
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The Sum of Our Days
- By: Isabel Allende
- Narrated by: Blair Brown, Isabel Allende
- Length: 11 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Isabel Allende reconstructs the painful reality of her own life in the wake of the tragic death of her daughter, Paula. Narrated with warmth, humor, exceptional candor, and wisdom, this remarkable memoir is as exuberant and as full of life as its creator. Allende bares her soul while sharing her thoughts on love, marriage, motherhood, spirituality and religion, infidelity, addiction, and memory - and recounts stories of the wildly eccentric, strong-minded, and eclectic tribe she gathers around her and lovingly embraces as a new kind of family.
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She does not disappoint
- By ChiChi's Rule on 06-01-22
By: Isabel Allende
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Why Homer Matters
- By: Adam Nicolson
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 9 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Adam Nicolson sees the Iliad and the Odyssey as the foundation myths of Greek - and our - consciousness, collapsing the passage of 4,000 years and making the distant past of the Mediterranean world as immediate to us as the events of our own time.
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Fascinating
- By Jean on 05-04-15
By: Adam Nicolson
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The Smell of Rain on Dust
- Grief and Praise
- By: Martín Prechtel
- Narrated by: Martín Prechtel
- Length: 4 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Inspiring hope, solace, and courage in living through our losses, author Martín Prechtel, trained in the Tzutujil Maya shamanic tradition, shares profound insights on the relationship between grief and praise in our culture - how the inability that many of us have to grieve and weep properly for the dead is deeply linked with the inability to give praise for living. In modern society, grief is something that we usually experience in private, alone, and without the support of a community.
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Grief is Praise and Love
- By Jericho V. Thorp on 10-02-21
By: Martín Prechtel
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Breathe
- A Letter to My Sons
- By: Imani Perry
- Narrated by: Imani Perry
- Length: 4 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Breathe explores the terror, grace, and beauty of coming of age as a Black person in contemporary America and what it means to parent our children in a persistently unjust world. Emotionally raw and deeply reflective, Imani Perry issues an unflinching challenge to society to see Black children as deserving of humanity. She admits fear and frustration for her African-American sons in a society that is increasingly racist and at times seems irredeemable. However, as a mother, feminist, writer, and intellectual, Perry offers an unfettered expression of love.
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Delightful peek into the heart & soul of a mother
- By Treesey on 10-08-19
By: Imani Perry
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Demian
- The Story of Emil Sinclair's Youth
- By: Hermann Hesse
- Narrated by: Jeff Woodman
- Length: 5 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Here is the dramatic story of young, docile Emil Sinclair's descent - led by precocious schoolmate Max Demian - into a secret and dangerous world of petty crime and revolt against convention and eventual awakening to selfhood.
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Demian
- By Debra on 12-08-08
By: Hermann Hesse
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The Willows
- By: Algernon Blackwood
- Narrated by: Nick Sampson
- Length: 2 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Perhaps Blackwood's most celebrated story, The Willows was influenced heavily by his own trips down the Danube River. It tells the story of two campers who pick the wrong place to sleep for the night, a place where another dimension impinges on our own. H.P. Lovecraft considered this the finest supernatural tale in English literature.
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Slowly building dread.
- By Barks Books on 12-19-16
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De Profundis
- By: Oscar Wilde
- Narrated by: David McCallion
- Length: 1 hr and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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At its heart, De Profundis is a love letter and is better known as the De Profundis papers. Written in 1897, while Oscar Wilde was imprisoned in Reading Gaol, De Profundis would become one of his best-known works. The papers include Wilde's account of living a lavish lifestyle and his relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, both of which he credited for his eventual downfall and imprisonment. The second half of the papers is Wilde's account of prison life and his spiritual awakening.
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This Work Really Is Wilde Going Off...
- By James E. Lytle on 05-16-21
By: Oscar Wilde
What listeners say about Half-light
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Mary K Foster
- 11-02-20
An Unfastening of the Voice from the Page
This audiobook is not a beginner’s edition of the Orphic genius Frank Bidart anymore than a volume of soliloquies is a beginning to Shakespeare or a best-of album is a beginning to Maria Callas. This audiobook is a brief, bright handful of only a few of Bidart’s sundry masterpieces, including “Ellen West,” “The War of Valsav Nijinsky,” and “The Second Hour of the Night.” If you know Bidart, this audiobook is coming home when you didn’t know you were lost. If you are new to Bidart (I envy you), this might be a steep climb with a bit of outside homework, but it is worth every effort and more because Bidart is that much of a master. Whenever possible, listen to each poem multiple times, find a copy of the poem, read the copy, then listen to Bidart read while looking at the copy of the poem because THAT is the genius of Bidart: his life’s craft and success is that he found a way to order and choreograph the voice of his poetry within spatial psyche of the physical page’s architecture so that when he reads aloud, it’s like hearing someone play from their own sheet music on an instrument of their own making: devastatingly beautiful, otherworldly in scale, and impossible to forget. Ps: there is no “correct” order here, but seasoned Bidart readers might enjoy starting with “Writing Ellen West.” Bidart beginners, start with “The Old Man at the Wheel,” then “He is Ava Gardner,” then go back to “Ellen West.” Go forth, be brave, drink deeply, and always drive directly into the sun.
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