Poetry bestsellers

The Iliad

A New Translation by Caroline Alexander

By: Homer & Caroline Alexander
Narrated by: Dominic Keating
Length: 19 hours 46 minutes

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

An American Sunrise

Poems

By: Joy Harjo
Narrated by: Joy Harjo
Length: 1 hour 40 minutes

A stunning new volume from the first Native American Poet Laureate of the United States, informed by her tribal history and connection to the land.In the early 1800s, the Mvskoke people were forcibly removed from their original lands east of the Mississippi to Indian Territory, which is now part of Oklahoma. Two hundred years later, Joy Harjo... Read more

How to Be a Good Savage and Other Poems

Seedbank

By: Mikeas Sánchez
Narrated by: Mikeas Sánchez, Wendy Call & Shook
Length: 3 hours 47 minutes

“This audiobook is so wonderful as it reads each poem in all three languages: the translation into English, as well as the original Zoque and Spanish. Hearing the Zoque read aloud is incredibly powerful to me as a reader and knowledge-seeker, because it expanded my understanding of the language and actively preserves its sounds and rhythms. I was... Read more

Couplets

A Love Story

By: Maggie Millner
Narrated by: Maggie Millner
Length: 1 hour 29 minutes

“A beautiful story of self-discovery and new love, told in rhyme. Maggie Millner performs this short audiobook with a spare, confessional, and self-questioning style that gives shape to the transformation of her self-identity. Read more

How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons)

Poetry

By: Barbara Kingsolver
Narrated by: Barbara Kingsolver
Length: 2 hours 12 minutes

“Kingsolver writes poetry that is both accessible and profound. This is the kind of collection you’ll loan out to a friend or relative and never get back. You should probably go ahead and buy two or three all at once! Read more

At Blackwater Pond

Mary Oliver reads Mary Oliver

By: Mary Oliver
Narrated by: Mary Oliver
Length: 1 hour

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

Nikki Giovanni: Love Poems & A Good Cry

What We Learn From Tears and Laughter

By: Nikki Giovanni
Narrated by: Nikki Giovanni
Length: 2 hours 42 minutes

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

Letters to a Young Poet

By: Rainer Maria Rilke
Narrated by: Dan Stevens & Max Deacon
Length: 1 hour 51 minutes

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable, audiobook edition of Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, read by Max Deacon and Dan Stevens.

At the start of the twentieth century, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a series of letters to a young officer cadet, advising him on writing, love, sex, suffering and the nature of advice itself; these... Read more

Zilot & Other Important Rhymes

By: Bob Odenkirk
Narrated by: Bob Odenkirk, Emo Philips, Ron Funches, Samuel Robert Epstein & Maria Bamford
Length: 1 hour 3 minutes

Emmy Award-winning and New York Times bestselling writer, comedian, and actor Bob Odenkirk and his daughter, illustrator Erin Odenkirk, present poetic nonsense for all ages perfect for fans of Shel Silverstein and Jack Prelutsky!

Bob Odenkirk began writing these poems with his children when they were little, compiling the poetry into a homemade... Read more

Black Roses

Odes Celebrating Powerful Black Women

By: Harold Green III
Narrated by: Harold Green III
Length: 1 hour 25 minutes

The poet and founder of the music collective Flowers for the Living pays tribute to all Black women by focusing on visionaries and leaders who are making history right now, including Ava DuVernay, Janelle Monae, Kamala Harris, Misty Copeland, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Robin Roberts, Roxane Gay, and Simone Biles—with this compilation of celebratory... Read more

Hafiz's Little Book of Life

By: Hafiz
Narrated by: Samara Naeymi
Length: 1 hour 27 minutes

Have you heard the name "Hafiz"?! Here are soaring flights of fancy and solid life lessons, from one of the greatest poets of all time—made new by two award-winning translators. This is the perfect introduction to Hafiz for all lovers of poetry and seekers of love, spirituality, and meaning.

I have this gem / And it's looking for a... Read more

The Unfolding

An Invitation to Come Home to Yourself

By: Arielle Estoria
Narrated by: Arielle Estoria
Length: 3 hours 55 minutes

Arielle Estoria is known for her moving and empowering words that encourage women and all people to be confident in who they are, compassionate about where they’ve been, and loving about who they are becoming. In this stunning collection of essays, poems, and meditations, Estoria tenderly reveals the places in her life where she has been broken... Read more

I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times

Poems

By: Taylor Byas
Narrated by: Taylor Byas
Length: 1 hour 51 minutes

“Ease on down the road with this stellar poetry collection that takes you on a journey full of love and a search for a greater truth as it relates to the speaker’s identity and womanhood. Chicago’s south side is well represented as a home that will always welcome you with open arms no matter how far or how lost you may be. Read more

Beowulf: A New Translation

By: Maria Dahvana Headley
Narrated by: JD Jackson & Maria Dahvana Headley
Length: 4 hours 8 minutes

“Narrated by JD Jackson. Sooo good! I listened to to this book 3x.!!! Beautiful! Read more

The Odyssey

Penguin Audio Classics

By: Homer
Narrated by: Ian McKellen
Length: 13 hours 2 minutes

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

Earth Keeper

Reflections on the American Land

By: N. Scott Momaday
Narrated by: N. Scott Momaday
Length: 51 minutes

""Dazzling. . . . In glittering prose, Momaday recalls stories passed down through generations, illuminating the earth as a sacrosanct place of wonder and abundance. At once a celebration and a warning, Earth Keeper is an impassioned defense of all that our endangered planet stands to lose."" — EsquireA magnificent testament to the earth, from... Read more

The Hill We Climb

An Inaugural Poem for the Country

By: Amanda Gorman
Narrated by: Amanda Gorman & Oprah Winfrey
Length: 9 minutes

Amanda Gorman’s powerful and historic poem “The Hill We Climb,” read at President Joe Biden’s inauguration

“Stunning.” —CNN 
“Dynamic.” —NPR
“Deeply rousing and uplifting.” —Vogue


On January 20, 2021, Amanda Gorman became the sixth and youngest poet to deliver a poetry reading at a presidential inauguration. Taking the stage after the 46th... Read more

A Fortune For Your Disaster

Poems

By: Hanif Abdurraqib
Narrated by: Hanif Abdurraqib
Length: 1 hour 36 minutes

“Pain. Peace. Power. A startlingly cohesive deep dive into grief and heartbreak and possibility that will sit with you through the hardest days and act at once as a mirror and window. This is one to sit with again and again, and revel in its interconnectedness. Beautifully narrated by the author. Read more

The Hurting Kind

By: Ada Limón
Narrated by: Ada Limón
Length: 1 hour 41 minutes

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

Time Is a Mother

By: Ocean Vuong
Narrated by: Ocean Vuong
Length: 1 hour 43 minutes

“I was stunned by Vuong’s gorgeous prose and raw revelations. Time is a Mother was an intense experience. The audiobook is less that two hours, but I have spent days thinking about Vuong’s words. I highly recommend this incredible poetry collection. Read more

Leaves of Grass

1855 Edition

By: Walt Whitman
Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
Length: 4 hours 19 minutes

In 1855, Walt Whitman published, at his own expense, the first edition of Leaves of Grass, a visionary volume of twelve poems. Showing the influence of a uniquely American form of mysticism known as Transcendentalism, the writing is distinguished by an explosively innovative free-verse style and previously unmentionable subject matter. Exalting... Read more

Aster of Ceremonies

Poems

Multiverse

By: JJJJJerome Ellis
Narrated by: JJJJJerome Ellis
Length: 6 hours 18 minutes

A polyphonic new entry in Multiverse—a literary series written and curated by the neurodivergent—JJJJJerome Ellis’s Aster of Ceremonies beautifully extends the vision of his debut book and album, The Clearing, a “lyrical celebration of and inquiry into the intersections of blackness, music, and disabled speech” (Claudia Rankine).Aster of... Read more

Some Things I Still Can't Tell You

Poems

By: Misha Collins
Narrated by: Misha Collins
Length: 57 minutes

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!  From Misha Collins, actor, longtime poet, and activist, whose massive online following calls itself his “Army For Good," comes his debut poetry collection, Some Things I Still Can't Tell You. Trademark wit and subtle vulnerability converge in each poem; this book is both a celebration of and aspiration for a life well... Read more

Tao Te Ching

A New English Version

By: Stephen Mitchell & Lao Tzu
Narrated by: Stephen Mitchell
Length: 1 hour 40 minutes

In 81 brief chapters, Lao-Tzu's Tao Te Ching, or Book of the Way, provides advice that imparts balance and perspective, a serene and generous spirit, and teaches us how to work for the good with the effortless skill that comes from being in accord with the Tao—the basic principle of the universe. Stephen Mitchell's bestselling version has been... Read more

Homie

Poems

By: Danez Smith
Narrated by: Danez Smith
Length: 1 hour 32 minutes

“In their third collection, Danez Smith shakes to life the parts of people that have gone to sleep waiting for this time in the world to be over. Those emotions that raise up too much anger or grief — all of them are alive again and seen and spoken for with utmost care and a tremendously welcome sense of humor. Pick this book up and carry it with... Read more

Call Us What We Carry

Poems

By: Amanda Gorman
Narrated by: Amanda Gorman
Length: 3 hours 31 minutes

The instant #1 New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestseller


The breakout poetry collection by #1 New York Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman

Formerly titled The Hill We Climb and Other Poems, the luminous poetry collection by #1 New York Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet... Read more

Black Oak

Odes Celebrating Powerful Black Men

By: Harold Green III
Narrated by: Harold Green III
Length: 1 hour 20 minutes

As he did for Black women in Black Roses, Harold Green III, poet and founder of the music collective Flowers for the Living, now honors the Black men he most admires—groundbreakers including Tyler Perry, Barry Jenkins, Billy Porter, Chance the Rapper, LeBron James, Colin Kaepernick, and John Legend—and celebrates their achievements which are... Read more

Life on Mars

Poems

By: Tracy K. Smith
Narrated by: Tracy K. Smith
Length: 1 hour 22 minutes

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

The Moon That Turns You Back

Poems

By: Hala Alyan
Narrated by: Hala Alyan
Length: 1 hour 37 minutes

From the author of The Arsonists’ City and The Twenty-Ninth Year, a new collection of poetry that traces the fragmentation of memory, archive, and family–past, present, future–in the face of displacement and war. A diaspora of memories runs through this poetry collection—a multiplicity of voices, bodies, and houses hold archival material for one... Read more

The Death of Sitting Bear

New and Selected Poems

By: N. Scott Momaday
Narrated by: N. Scott Momaday
Length: 2 hours 28 minutes

“From Pulitzer Prize-winning author (House Made of Dawn in 1969), Oklahoma Centennial State Poet Laureate, and acclaimed artist N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa) comes a new collection of more than 100 new and selected poems in The Death of Sitting Bear. Presented in three parts, some poems are quick tributes to natural phenomenon but made no less... Read more

I Talk Like a River

By: Jordan Scott
Narrated by: Jordan Scott
Length: 18 minutes

When a boy who stutters feels isolated, alone, and incapable of communicating in the way he'd like, it takes a kindly father and a walk by the river to help him find his voice. Through this powerful and uplifting story, poet Jordan Scott uses his own experiences to reveal what it’s like to be a child who feels lost, lonely, or unable to fit in.... Read more

The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On

By: Franny Choi
Narrated by: Franny Choi
Length: 1 hour 59 minutes

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

The Tradition

By: Jericho Brown
Narrated by: Jericho Brown
Length: 1 hour 3 minutes

Winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

Finalist for the 2019 National Book Award

Jericho Brown's daring book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown's poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human:... Read more

And Yet

Poems

By: Kate Baer
Narrated by: Kate Baer
Length: 54 minutes

The second full length poetry collection from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of What Kind of Woman.Kate Baer shot into the literary stratosphere with the publication of her debut poetry collection, What Kind of Woman, which became an instant #1 New York Times bestseller.Kate’s second full-length book of traditional poetry, And Yet,... Read more

Dream Drawings

Configurations of a Timeless Kind

By: N. Scott Momaday
Narrated by: N. Scott Momaday
Length: 2 hours

“Momaday must be ranked among the greatest of our contemporary writers.”—American ScholarFrom Pulitzer Prize winner and revered literary master N. Scott Momaday, a beautiful and enchanting new poetry collection, at once a celebration of language, imagination, and the human spirit.“Language and the imagination work hand in hand, and together they... Read more

Falling Back in Love with Being Human

Letters to Lost Souls

By: Kai Cheng Thom
Narrated by: Kai Cheng Thom
Length: 1 hour 34 minutes

A national bestseller in Canada, hailed by The New York Times as an “intimate expression of self-acceptance and forgiveness, tenderly written to fellow trans women and others.”

“Required reading.”—Glennon Doyle, #1 bestselling author of Untamed

A THEM AND AUTOSTRADDLE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • FINALIST FOR THE PAT LOWTHER MEMORIAL AWARD

What happens... Read more

Collected Poems 1947-1997

By: Allen Ginsberg
Narrated by: Greg D. Barnett
Length: 28 hours 11 minutes

"Taken all together, Ginsberg's poems are X-rays of a considerable part of American society during the last four decades." —the New Yorker

This magnificent volume gathers the published verse of Allen Ginsberg in its entirety, a half-century of brilliant work from one of America's greatest poets.

A chief figure among the Beats, Ginsberg changed... Read more

Dearly

New Poems

By: Margaret Atwood
Narrated by: Margaret Atwood
Length: 1 hour 46 minutes

A new book of poetry from internationally acclaimed, award-winning and bestselling author Margaret AtwoodIn Dearly, Margaret Atwood’s first collection of poetry in over a decade, Atwood addresses themes such as love, loss, the passage of time, the nature of nature and - zombies. Her new poetry is introspective and personal in tone, but... Read more

Fierce Fairytales

Poems and Stories to Stir Your Soul

By: Nikita Gill
Narrated by: Nikita Gill
Length: 2 hours 43 minutes

“When I say listening to this was transcendent, know that I don't say such things lightly. The audiobook is narrated by the author herself, and it further reminded me that poetry is meant to be read aloud, to be listened to. To be spoken by the writers and consumed in the exact way they want you to. Reading poetry in your own voice, with your own... Read more

The Terrible

A Storyteller's Memoir

By: Yrsa Daley-Ward
Narrated by: Yrsa Daley-Ward & Howard Daley-Ward
Length: 3 hours 59 minutes

“Enjoyed Daley-Ward's The How, but The Terrible was tough. It wasn't terrible - it was just, oh man, glad they got through it. How do people get through it and make a life. I'm so happy that Yrsa did. She is truly a great storyteller and has many yet to write. Now to read her poems in Bone! Read more

Allen Ginsberg Poetry Collection

By: Allen Ginsberg
Narrated by: Allen Ginsberg
Length: 3 hours 53 minutes

A collection of recordings written and read by one of the greatest literary and cultural figures of the 20th. The collection is accompanied by a special 64 page booklet containing the poems. Upon the release of his first published work, Howl and Other Poems (1956), Allen Ginsberg became the unlikely force of a movement that would change a... Read more

Poetic Remedies for Troubled Times

from Ask Baba Yaga

By: Taisia Kitaiskaia
Narrated by: Zura Johnson
Length: 1 hour 51 minutes

“Timely, heartwarming, and brimming with tough love, this little volume is just what we all need. Zura Johnson’s narration is versatile and absolutely perfect. Read more

Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings

Poems

By: Joy Harjo
Narrated by: Joy Harjo
Length: 1 hour 53 minutes

A musical, magical, resilient volume from the first Native American Poet Laureate of the United StatesIn these poems, the joys and struggles of the everyday are played against the grinding politics of being human. Beginning in a hotel room in the dark of a distant city, we travel through history and follow the memory of the Trail of Tears from... Read more

What Kind of Woman

Poems

By: Kate Baer
Narrated by: Kate Baer
Length: 1 hour 2 minutes

An Instant #1 New York Times BestsellerA Goop Book Club Pick""If you want your breath to catch and your heart to stop, turn to Kate Baer.""--Joanna Goddard, Cup of Jo
A stunning and honest debut poetry collection about the beauty and hardships of being a woman in the world today, and the many roles we play - mother, partner, and friend.“When life... Read more

The Carrying

Poems

By: Ada Limón
Narrated by: Ada Limón
Length: 1 hour 39 minutes

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

Hell, I Love Everybody: The Essential James Tate

Poems

Ecco Essentials

By: James Tate
Narrated by: James Tate & Michael Earl Craig
Length: 2 hours 1 minute

An essential collection of James Tate’s extraordinary poems that will captivate today’s readers, with a foreword by Terrance HayesCelebrating James Tate’s work as it transcends convention, time, and everything that tells us, “No, you can’t do that,” Hell, I Love Everybody gives us the poet at his best, his most intimate, hopeful, inventive, and... Read more

Ten Bridges I've Burnt

A Memoir in Verse

By: Brontez Purnell
Narrated by: Brontez Purnell
Length: 1 hour 28 minutes

In Ten Bridges I've Burnt, Brontez Purnell—the bard of the underloved and overlooked—turns his gaze inward. A storyteller with a musical eye for the absurdity of his own existence, he is peerless in his ability to find the levity within the stormiest of crises. Here, in his first collection of genre-defying verse, Purnell reflects on his... Read more

The Twenty-Ninth Year

By: Hala Alyan
Narrated by: Hala Alyan
Length: 1 hour 13 minutes

"This is the stuff of life, the very essence of the poetic." —LitHub

For Hala Alyan, twenty-nine is a year of transformation and upheaval, a year in which the past—memories of family members, old friends and past lovers, the heat of another land, another language, a different faith—winds itself around the present. Hala's ever-shifting,... Read more

The Noel Coward Audio Collection - Abridged

By: Noel Coward
Narrated by: Simon Jones
Length: 5 hours 18 minutes

Throughout his life, Noel Coward the master songwriter, 'derived a considerable amount of private pleasure from writing verse.' Much of it is gathered in this first ever CD collection. From moving war-time encounters to satirical barbs at familiar Coward targets and personal reminiscences, this delightful collection is a perfect blend of vintage... Read more

Aednan

An Epic

By: Linnea Axelsson
Narrated by: Angela Dawe
Length: 2 hours 48 minutes

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK • The winner of Sweden’s most prestigious literary award makes her American debut with an epic, multigenerational novel-in-verse about two Sámi families and their quest to stay together across a century of migration, violence, and colonial trauma.

“Crystalline prose that reads like poetry and myth at once. There are... Read more