We're celebrating Poetry Month with audiobooks
Every poetry month (aka. April), enthusiastic readers turn their attention to works of verse.
Because poetry is so much about the music of language, hearing it aloud can open up a line or whole poem in ways that letters on a page (or screen!) never will. We’ve pulled together some great recent collections, as well as a few must-listen classics to help poetry fans new and old to dig in.
The Hill We Climb
Who will ever forget the electrifying performance of Amanda Gorman at the 2021 presidential inauguration? In this brief audiobook, including a foreword by Oprah Winfrey, the young poet delivers a stirring reading of her anthemic poem, The Hill We Climb.
Runaway
In this new collection Jorie Graham offers a vision of the future, and asks what will survive and what will not. Love? Identity? The air we breathe?
Tarantula
Angry, funny, and elusive. If you tried reading this (so many readers have tried reading this) and couldn’t make it work in your head, let star audiobook narrator Will Patton lend a hand with this iconic book.
Black Girl, Call Home
Each of these poems explores what it means to be a daughter of Newark, and America—and the painful, joyous path to adulthood as a young, queer Black woman.
Hope Is the Thing with Feathers
It’s hard to believe that few who knew Emily Dickinson knew she was a poet. Today she stands as a giant of modern poetry, and this collection of her complete poems is a great way to savour every word she wrote.
God I Feel Modern Tonight
Cat Cohen is a new breed of everywoman--a one-woman standup chanteuse, a larger-than-life best friend, who will say all the outrageous things we think but never say out loud ourselves.
What Kind of Woman
Her words make women feel seen in their own bodies, in their own marriages, and in their own lives.
Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings
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 the bend in the Tallapoosa River to a place near the Arkansas River. Stomp dance songs, blues, and jazz ballads echo throughout.
The Waste Land & Four Quartets
These are masterly readings by renowned thespian Paul Schofield of two of Eliot’s best-known poems, performed for radio on the 80th anniversary of the publication of The Waste Land. It’s from that poem that the line “April is the cruellest month…” comes -- the reason we’re celebrating poetry this month.
Make Me Rain
One of America’s most celebrated poets (she can count Oprah among her fans) challenges readers with this powerful and deeply personal collection of verse that speaks to the injustices of society while illuminating the depths of her own heart.
We Inherit What the Fires Left
Here award-winning poet William Evans explores the lived experience of race in the American suburbs and what gets passed from generation to generation.
Pale Colors in a Tall Field
These poems are both timeless and timely, asking how we can ever truly know ourselves in the face of our own remembering and inevitable forgetting.
Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass
The queen of ice cold pop reads fourteen of her poems accompanied by music from Grammy Award–winning musician and producer Jack Antonoff.
I Would Leave Me If I Could.
Halsey bares her soul in this poetry -- exactly as fans of her music would expect. More hand grenades than confessions, these autobiographical poems explore and dismantle conventional notions of what it means to be a feminist in search of power.
Milk and Honey
Here’s the poet most responsible for the rise in popularity of poetry in the late 2010s reading her own poems from her debut collection.