Showing results by publisher "Recorded Books" in Poetry

Dramatic, intense, and gripping, The Inferno of Dante is an astonishing masterpiece that no listener can afford to miss. Robert Pinsky, the distinguished American poet, preserves the burning clarity and universal relevance of this 13th-century literary masterpiece in a triumphant new translation for our times. Line by line, canto by canto, Robert Pinksy affirms The Inferno as a powerful living classic for today’s listeners.

National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward takes James Baldwin's 1963 examination of race in America, The Fire Next Time, as a jumping-off point for this groundbreaking collection of essays and poems about race from the most important voices of her generation and our time.

Ann Burton's critically acclaimed first novel in this compelling Biblical series tells the fictionalized tale of a young Jewish woman who makes pottery to support her family. But when her brother's huge gambling debt threatens to enslave them, she convinces his creditor to marry her and forgive the debt. After her husband sends her to manage his herds in the hills, Abigail grows fond of the rustic inhabitants - and of an enigmatic shepherd soldier who's on a collision course with her husband.

Bossy bank executive Senalda breaks down men from business to bed no holds barred. Hip hop PR guru Jarena praises the Lord and pursues married men with equal persistence. Famous and infamous radio personality Mimi fights with her fans and for the love of her on-and-off-again boyfriend. But when an ABC News Nightline report, "Single, Black, Female - and Plenty of Company" asks why can't a successful Black woman find a man, the friends are suddenly hyper-aware of their inclusion in the sad statistic: 42 percent of Black women who have never been married.

In this course we'll explore how Walt Whitman broke with the tyranny of European literary forms to establish a broad, new voice for American poetry. By throwing aside the stolid conventions and clichéd meters of old Europe, Walt Whitman produced a vital, compelling form of verse, one expressive of the nature of his new world and its undiscovered countries, both physical and spiritual, intimate and gloriously public.

When 16-year-old Angel meets Call at the mall, he buys her meals and says he loves her, and he gives her some candy that makes her feel like she can fly. Pretty soon she's addicted to his candy, and she moves in with him. As a favor, he asks her to hook up with a couple of friends of his, and then a couple more. Now Angel is stuck working the streets at Hastings and Main, a notorious spot in Vancouver, Canada, where the girls turn tricks until they disappear without a trace, and the authorities don't care.

When Kevin Powell's elderly mother became ill, he returned home ever week to take her grocery shopping in Jersey City. Walking behind her during those trips, Powell began to hear her voice, stories, and language in a new way—and examined his own healing while praying for hers. Grocery Shopping with My Mother originated as social media posts about these visits and evolved into a breathtaking collection of thirty-two new poems, crafted like an album, plus four bonus tracks celebrating a great love of wordplay.

In Customs, Solmaz Sharif examines what it means to exist in the nowhere of the arrivals terminal, a continual series of checkpoints, officers, searches, and questionings that become a relentless experience of America. With resignation and austerity, these poems trace a pointed indoctrination to the customs of the nation-state and the English language, and the realities they impose upon the imagination, the paces they put us through.

Author of Sutter's Cross, a Booklist Top Pick, W. Dale Cramer evokes the ambiance of a small Southern town in this inspiring novel. Jeremy's mother has passed away, leaving him with an odd request. He is to find his Uncle Aiden, a hardrock miner, and stay with him, regardless of Aiden's wishes. Jeremy's faith in God gives him the courage to find the humanity behind this tough-as-steel man.

Subverting celebrated classics of poetry and mythology and examining horrors from contemporary film and cultural fact, National Book Award-winner Justin Phillip Reed engages darkness as an aesthetic to conjure the revenant animus that lurks beneath the exploited civilities of marginalized people. In these poems, Reed finds agency in the other-than-human identities assigned to those assaulted by savageries of the state. In doing so, he summons a retaliatory, counterviolent black spirit to revolt and to inhabit the revolting.

A landmark collection of poetry by acclaimed fiction writer, translator, and MacArthur Fellow John Keene, Punks: New Selected Poems is a generous treasury in seven sections that spans decades and includes previously unpublished and brand new work. With depth and breadth, Punks weaves together historic narratives of loss, lust, and love.

The 154 sonnets of William Shakespeare contain some of the best-known, most-quoted lines in the English language. This collection brings dozens of those immortal poems to vivid life. Included here are: Numbers 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"), 130 ("My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun"), 147 ("My love is as a fever"), 151 ("Love is too young to know what conscience is"), and many more. Almost everything about the sonnets is controversial: the identity of the recipients, the young man and the Dark Lady, the dates the sonnets were written - and some even question if they were indeed written by the Bard. But their beauty and eloquence are beyond reproach.

Acclaimed author Joyce Sidman has received multiple awards for her books of poetry, including a Caldecott Honor for Red Sings from Treetops. Itself a Newbery Honor, Book, Dark Emperor and Other Poems of the Night features several spellbinding poems about “the feast of sound and spark” that awakens with the raccoons, snails, owls, and crickets each night after sunset.

Shaped around moments of puncture and release, The Rupture Tense registers what leaks across the breached borders between past and future, background and foreground, silence and utterance. In polyphonic and formally restless sequences, Jenny Xie cracks open reverberant, vexed experiences of diasporic homecoming, intergenerational memory transfer, state-enforced amnesia, public secrecies, and the psychic fallout of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Across these poems, memory—historical, collective, personal—stains and erodes.

This collection of short poems from Newbery Award-winning author Paul Fleischman delightfully celebrates the essence of birds. The companion to Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices, its poems feature two voices speaking sometimes together and sometimes in turn. Experience the magic and magnificence of the immortal phoenix. Enjoy the fluttering elation of finches at dawn and the swiftness of swallows at dusk. And empathize with the loneliness of the pigeon in the Cincinnati Zoo.

In What Lies Within by CBA best-selling author Karen Ball, something is missing from the life of the successful owner of Justice Construction Co. But Kyla Justice doesn’t realize what it is until she begins building a center for inner-city kids. She’s now undeterred by supply problems or gang opposition. She won’t be stopped by her boyfriend’s suggestion to sell her businessand marry him. And she certainly won’t be sidetracked by that disagreeable Rafael Murphy.

The smiling Buddha, or the Buddha of laughter, was a vagabond monk in the 10th cenury. Known as Pu Tai in China and Hotei in Japan, he found supreme happiness one stormy day under a bridge after a loud thunderclap illuminated his purpose. From that day forward, he traveled throughout China sharing his wisdom with laughter and good humor.

Reverend Herbert F. Smith is a noted theologian, author, and scholar. Hidden Victory, an internationally best-selling novel, has been published in numerous countries around the world. For this work, Smith engaged in extensive research and lived in the Holy Land while he wrote the first draft. A historical novel of Jesus’ life, Hidden Victory can be approached as revelation, as history, and as adventure.

"Where does all the grief go when it's not tugging at your wrist?" Enyegue's debut collection is an ode to girlhood, to Blackness, to generational trauma, sexual assault, and mental health. This collection does not aim to heal anyone who listens to it, but instead help them confront their own healing. Rather than sugar-coated bullets that enter you lightly, these poems are designed to hurt.

Joanna Klink's fifth book begins with personal poems of loss - a tree ripped out by a windstorm, a friendship broken off after decades, the nearing death of parents. Other poems take on the cost of not loving fully, or are written from disbelief at the accumulation of losses and at the mercilessness of having, as one ages, to rule things out. There are elegies for friends, and a group of devotional poems. The Nightfields closes with "Night Sky", 30 metaphysical poems inspired by the artist James Turrell's Roden Crater....