Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Themes & Styles

Empowering life lessons from myths and monsters. Encounter rebel goddesses, stories of complex love and the mythical might of women as Nikita Gill takes listeners on a magical journey of empowerment. Inspired by ancient Greek mythology, discover the power and glory of the greatest goddesses. From the potent venom of Medusa and transformative sorcery of Circe to the rising up of Athena over Olympus, these are the mothers, warriors, creators, survivors and destroyers that shook the world.

From navigating the oft competing worlds of religion and desire, to balancing society’s expectations with the raw experience of being a woman in the world; from detailing the experiences of growing up as a first generation black British woman, to working through situations of dependence and abuse; from finding solace in the echoing caverns of depression and loss, to exploring the vulnerability and redemption in falling in love, each of the raw and immediate poems in Daley-Ward’s bone resonates to the core of what it means to be human.

With A Year of Last Things, acclaimed novelist Michael Ondaatje returns to poetry, where he began his career over fifty years ago, and what a return it is. Born in Sri Lanka during the Second World War, Ondaatje was sent as a child to school in London, and later moved to Canada. While he has lived here since, these poems reflect the life of a writer, traveller and watcher of the world – describing himself as a “mongrel,” someone born out of diverse cultures.

Through emotional snapshots that span from her adolescence through her early 20s, each brought to life in Yrsa's gorgeous signature style of open white spaces and stirring, singular lines, The Terrible evokes the pain and thrill of girlhood, as well as what it means to discover the fear and power that come with being a woman. With a sharp eye and a rare talent for mining the beauty and the sorrow in the everyday, Yrsa recounts her remarkable life.

Full of brilliant wit, dynamic energy, and a heavy dose of reality, Love Poems for Married People takes the poetic form, turns it upside-down, and leaves it in the dishwasher to dry. Inspired by one of the most shared New Yorker pieces of all time, this collection captures the reality of life once the spark of a relationship has settled - and hilariously so. With brand new pieces that cover all areas of married life, Kenney's wry observations and sharp humor remind us exactly what it's like to spend the rest of your life with the person you love.

Visceral and astonishing, Paul Tran's debut poetry collection All the Flowers Kneeling investigates intergenerational trauma, sexual violence, and U.S. imperialism in order to radically alter our understanding of freedom, power, and control. In poems of desire, gender, bodies, legacies, and imagined futures, Tran’s poems elucidate the complex and harrowing processes of reckoning and recovery, enhanced by innovative poetic forms that mirror the nonlinear emotional and psychological experiences of trauma survivors.

In the spirit of his New York Times best seller Love Poems for Married People and Love Poems for People with Children, as well as his wildly popular New Yorker pieces, Thurber Prize-winner John Kenney presents a hilarious new collection of poetry for anxious people.

With the same brilliant wit and hilarious realism that made Love Poems for Married People such a hit, John Kenney is back with a brand new collection of poems, this time taking on the greatest "joy" in life: children. Kenney covers it all, from newborns, toddlers, and sleep deprivation, to the terrible twos, terrible tweens, and terrible teens. A parent's love is unconditional, but sometimes that button can't help but be pushed.

Gregory Pardlo described Joshua Bennett's first collection of poetry, The Sobbing School, as an "arresting debut" that was "abounding in tenderness and rich with character", with a "virtuosic kind of code switching". Bennett's new collection, Owed, is a book with celebration at its center. Its primary concern is how we might mend the relationship between ourselves and the people, spaces, and objects we have been taught to think of as insignificant, as fundamentally unworthy of study, reflection, attention, or care.

The three sections of Terrance Hayes’ seventh collection explore how we see ourselves and our world, mapping the strange and lyrical grammar of thinking and feeling. In “Watch Your Mouth,” a tree frog sings to overcome its fear of birds; in “Watch Your Step: The Kafka Virus,” a talking cat tells jokes in the Jim Crow South; in “Watch Your Head,“ green beans bling in the mouth of Lil Wayne, and Bob Ross paints your portrait.

The title is Search Party, the idea being that we’re all out here looking for something, and my poems are my way of finding myself. A young black poet blending spoken word and rap; an inner city upbringing with a Cambridge education; a social consciousness with a satirical wit and infectious rhythm--George the Poet is the voice of a new generation. Search Party is a thought-provoking and deeply autobiographical collection.

Ragged and raging across the spectrums of cognition, race, and gender, Tarta Americana lyrically envisions forms of survival outside neuronormative perceptions and histories. Against the recent tide of white nationalism in the United States, Tarta Americana finds a rhinestone in Ritchie Valens, the rock and roll legend, surfacing across time and bodies, genders and sounds, displacing the linear unfolding of desire and biography.

The work of Carl Dennis has won praise for its “integrity, its substance, and its seemingly effortless craft; and for its embodiment of passionate inquiry” (Times Literary Supplement). The title of his new collection, Earthborn, helps to point the way to its two central concerns: how to find meaning, as creatures of the earth, in lives that are short and frail and destined to be forgotten; and how, as stewards of the earth, to address the need to protect our home from ourselves, from the menace to life posed by our own species.

The Vita nuova is elaborately and symbolically patterned, consisting of a selection of Dante's early poems interspersed with his own prose commentary. The poems themselves tell the story of his love for Beatrice, from their first meeting at a May Day party in her father's house, through Dante's sufferings and his attempts to conceal the true object of his devotion by the use of "screen-loves", to his overwhelming grief at her death, ending with the transformative vision of her in heaven.

Denise Levertov has called the poet Pattiann Rogers “a visionary of reality, perceiving the material world with such intensity of response that impulse, intention, meaning, interconnections beyond the skin of appearance are revealed.” The consistent theme In Flickering, her new collection, is the very breadth and prodigiousness of the universe itself. These wise poems, many inspired by various kinds of flickering actions in plants, animals, and natural processes, move nimbly between inner and outer worlds.

Self-love is not as simple as it sounds. More than basic self-care practises and everyday indulgences, it is the key to unlocking your inner power and fostering true healing within yourself. With the same welcoming and honest voice—that of an empathetic best friend who’s been through it all—that people know and love online, Ruby Dhal shares her own personal stories and advice. Through Ruby’s gentle words, discover how to harness the power of self-love to transform all aspects of your life.

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.

Tyler Knott Gregson is the original InstaPoet. With loyal fans across the country and all over the internet, he breathes new life into this ancient medium and delights fans with his openness and honesty. This new book will be his first poetry collection in four years, and he returns now with a message of hope. In his elegant and simple style, Gregson will lift your spirits, keep you going when times get tough, and remind you of the inherent inner strength you already have within you.

From a visionary writer praised for her captivating work on Black history and experience, comes a poetry collection exploring personal, political, and artistic frontiers, journeying from her family's history as "Afropioneers" in the American West to shimmering glimpses of transcendent, liberated futures.

In this deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of his mother's death, embodying the paradox of sitting within grief while being determined to survive beyond it. Shifting through memory, and in concert with the themes of his novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong contends with personal loss, the meaning of family and the cost of being the product of an American war in America. At once vivid, brave and propulsive, Vuong's poems circle fragmented lives to find both restoration as well as the epicentre of the break.