Poetry audiobooks

The Odyssey

By: Homer
Narrated by: Ian McKellen
Length: 13 hours 2 minutes
Abridged: No

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 »

Make Me Rain

By: Nikki Giovanni
Narrated by: Nikki Giovanni
Length: 1 hour 40 minutes
Abridged: No

One of America’s most celebrated poets challenges us with this powerful and deeply personal collection of verse that speaks to the injustices of society while illuminating the depths of her own heart.

For more than thirty years, Nikki Giovanni’s poetry has inspired, enlightened, and dazzled readers. As sharp and outspoken as ever, this artist... Read more »

How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons)

By: Barbara Kingsolver
Narrated by: Barbara Kingsolver
Length: 2 hours 12 minutes
Abridged: No

In this intimate collection, the beloved author of The Poisonwood Bible and more than a dozen other New York Times bestsellers, winner or finalist for the Pulitzer and countless other prizes, now trains her eye on the everyday and the metaphysical in poems that are smartly crafted, emotionally rich, and luminous. 

In her second poetry collection,... Read more »

The Tradition

By: Jericho Brown
Narrated by: JD Jackson
Length: 59 minutes
Abridged: No

Jericho Brown's daring new 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: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie? Brown makes... Read more »

I Would Leave Me If I Could.

By: Halsey
Narrated by: Halsey
Length: 1 hour 32 minutes
Abridged: No

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Grammy Award–nominated, platinum-selling musician Halsey is heralded as one of the most compelling voices of her generation. In I Would Leave Me If I Could, she reveals never-before-heard poetry of longing, love, and the nuances of bipolar disorder.

In this intimate audio performance of her debut collection, Halsey bares... Read more »

Seamus Heaney I Collected Poems (published 1966-1975)

By: Seamus Heaney
Narrated by: Seamus Heaney
Length: 3 hours 3 minutes
Abridged: No

Volume One of the definitive collection of Seamus Heaney reading his own work, recorded in 2009 by RTE. Volume One contains four collections published between 1966 and 1975: Death of a Naturalist, Door into the Dark, Wintering Out and North. Read more »

The Essential Rumi, New Expanded Edition

By: Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, Coleman Barks & Coleman Barks
Narrated by: John Moyne, A. J. Arberry, Reynold Nicholson & Robertson Dean
Length: 9 hours 22 minutes
Abridged: No

This revised and expanded edition of The Essential Rumi includes a new introduction by Coleman Barks and more than eighty never-before-published poems.

Through his lyrical translations, Coleman Barks has been instrumental in bringing this exquisite literature to a remarkably wide range of readers, making the ecstatic, spiritual poetry of... Read more »

Tarantula

By: Bob Dylan
Narrated by: Will Patton & Dennis Boutsikaris
Length: 3 hours 9 minutes
Abridged: No

Never before on audio! Music legend Bob Dylan’s only work of fiction—a combination of stream-of-consciousness prose, lyrics, and poetry that illuminates the creative process of one of the most influential musicians and songwriters of our time—finally comes to audio in a magnificent performance by award-winning narrator Will Patton!

Written in... Read more »

Spoon River Anthology

By: Edgar Lee Masters
Narrated by: Patrick Fraley, Edward Asner & a full cast
Length: 4 hours 23 minutes
Abridged: No

Deemed “essential” in the canon of American literature, this audiobook masterpiece performed in its entirety by a full cast of fifty makes the classic accessible to everyone.

From a cemetery in a fictional mid-American town, the dead speak the truths about their lives. Some speak of hardships and sordid affairs, while others speak of their... Read more »

Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass

By: Lana Del Rey
Narrated by: Lana Del Rey
Length: 38 minutes
Abridged: No

The New York Times bestselling debut book of poetry from Lana Del Rey, Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass.

“Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass is the title poem of the book and the first poem I wrote of many. Some of which came to me in their entirety, which I dictated and then typed out, and some that I worked laboriously picking apart each... Read more »

At Blackwater Pond

By: Mary Oliver
Narrated by: Mary Oliver
Length: 1 hour
Abridged: No

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 »

The Iliad

By: Robert Fitzgerald & Homer
Narrated by: Dan Stevens
Length: 13 hours 59 minutes
Abridged: No

Since it was first published more than forty years ago, Robert Fitzgerald's prizewinning translation of Homer's battle epic has become a classic in its own right: a standard against which all other versions of The Iliad are compared. This definitive translation of Homer's epic is timeless in its authority and always fresh in its vivid rendering... Read more »

Many Miles

By: Mary Oliver
Narrated by: Mary Oliver
Length: 41 minutes
Abridged: No

Following the success of At Blackwater Pond, this second audio reccording from bestselling poet Mary Oliver contains a selection of thirty-seven previously published poems and four new, read by the poet in her steady, magnetic voice. Oliver recites from the full range of her poetry—from her classic nature writing to her verses for her... Read more »

Homie

By: Danez Smith
Narrated by: Danez Smith
Length: 1 hour 32 minutes
Abridged: No

Danez Smith is our president Homie is Danez Smith's magnificent anthem about the saving grace of friendship. Rooted in the loss of one of Smith's close friends, this book comes out of the search for joy and intimacy within a nation where both can seem scarce and getting scarcer. In poems of rare power and generosity, Smith acknowledges that in a... Read more »

The Death of Sitting Bear

By: N. Scott Momaday
Narrated by: N. Scott Momaday
Length: 2 hours 28 minutes
Abridged: No

Pulitzer Prize winner and celebrated American master N. Scott Momaday returns with a radiant collection of more than 200 new and selected poems rooted in Native American tradition. 

“The poems in this book reflect my deep respect for and appreciation of words. . . . I believe that poetry is the highest form of verbal expression. Although I have... Read more »

Keep Moving

By: Maggie Smith
Narrated by: Maggie Smith
Length: 2 hours 14 minutes
Abridged: No

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

“A meditation on kindness and hope, and how to move forward through grief.” —NPR

“A shining reminder to learn all we can from this moment, rebuilding ourselves in the darkness so that we may come out wiser, kinder, and stronger on the other side.” —The Boston Globe

“Powerful essays on loss, endurance, and renewal.” —People

... Read more »

The Essential T.S. Eliot

By: T.S. Eliot
Narrated by: T.S. Eliot, Vijay Seshadri, Daniel Halpern, Willem Dafoe, Natasha Trethewey, Meghan O'Rourke, Natalie Diaz, Frank Bidart, Joy Harjo, Rosanna Warren, Emily Jungmin Yoon, Tracy K. Smith, Nicole Sealey, Jorie Graham, Kevin Young, Louise Gluck, Eileen Myles, Carol Muske-Dukes, Campbell McGrath & Robert Hass
Length: 3 hours 49 minutes
Abridged: No

A selection of the most significant and enduring poems from one of the twentieth century’s major writers, chosen and introduced by Vijay Seshadri, performed by T.S. Eliot, Vijay Seshadri, Daniel Halpern, Willem Dafoe, Natasha Trethewey, Meghan O'Rourke, Natalie Diaz, Frank Bidart,  Joy Harjo, Rosanna Warren, Emily Jungmin Yoon, Tracy K. Smith,... Read more »

Dearly

By: Margaret Atwood
Narrated by: Margaret Atwood
Length: 1 hour 47 minutes
Abridged: No

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

The collection of a lifetime from the bestselling novelist and poet.

By turns moving, playful and wise, the poems gathered in Dearly are about absences and endings, ageing and retrospection, but also about gifts and renewals. They explore bodies and minds in transition, as well as the everyday objects and rituals that embed us... Read more »

Inward

By: Yung Pueblo
Narrated by: Yung Pueblo
Length: 1 hour 17 minutes
Abridged: No

true poweris livingthe realizationthat you are your ownhealer, hero, and leader

Inward is a collection of poetry, quotes, and prose that explores the movement from self love to unconditional love, the power of letting go, and the wisdom that comes when we truly try to know ourselves. It serves as a reminder to the listener that healing,... Read more »

Library of Small Catastrophes

By: Alison C. Rollins
Narrated by: Janina Edwards
Length: 1 hour 22 minutes
Abridged: No

Library of Small Catastrophes, Alison Rollins's ambitious debut collection, interrogates the body and nation as storehouses of countless tragedies. Drawing from Jorge Luis Borges's fascination with the library, Rollins uses the concept of the archive to offer a lyric history of the ways in which we process loss. "Memory is about the future, not... Read more »

Together in a Sudden Strangeness

By: Alice Quinn
Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini, Gisela Chípe, Catherine Cohen, Michael Crouch, Catherine Ho, Hillary Huber, Nicole Lewis, Dani Martineck, Prentice Onayemi, Elisabeth Rodgers, Neil Shah & Shayna Small
Length: 3 hours 18 minutes
Abridged: No

In this urgent outpouring of American voices, our poets speak to us as they shelter in place, addressing our collective fear, grief, and hope from eloquent and diverse individual perspectives.

**Featuring 107 poets, from A to Z—Julia Alvarez to Matthew Zapruder—with work in between by Jericho Brown, Billy Collins, Fanny Howe, Ada Limón, Sharon... Read more »

Dear Mother

By: Bunmi Laditan
Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
Length: 1 hour 4 minutes
Abridged: No

The first collection of poetry from Bunmi Laditan, bestselling author of Confessions of a Domestic Failure and creator of The Honest Toddler, capturing the honesty, rawness, sheer joy and total madness of motherhood. With the compassion and wit that have made her a social media sensation among mothers around the world, Bunmi Laditan puts into... Read more »

A Fortune For Your Disaster

By: Hanif Abdurraqib
Narrated by: Hanif Abdurraqib
Length: 1 hour 36 minutes
Abridged: No

In his much-anticipated follow-up to The Crown Ain't Worth Much, poet, essayist, biographer, and music critic Hanif Abdurraqib has written a book of poems about how one rebuilds oneself after a heartbreak, the kind that renders them a different version of themselves than the one they knew. It's a book about a mother's death, and admitting that... Read more »

1919

By: Eve L. Ewing
Narrated by: Eve L. Ewing
Length: 1 hour 5 minutes
Abridged: No

The Chicago Race Riot of 1919, the most intense of the riots comprising the nation’s Red Summer, has shaped the last century but is not widely discussed. In 1919, award-winning poet Eve L. Ewing explores the story of this event—which lasted eight days and resulted in thirty-eight deaths and almost 500 injuries—through poems recounting the... Read more »