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

Do You Believe in Fairies?

Compositions of Truth & Nature in Art & Poetry

By: Ashley Anne Strobridge
Narrated by: Ashley Anne Strobridge
Length: 51 minutes

This is an audio journey through a collection of original Nature photography paired with original poetry & prose. Within you'll find lyrical audio descriptions of photos spanning the landscapes of my home state of Vermont, as well as a curated selection of photos from Virginia. This art is paired with whimsical & impactful poetry in... 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

Time Is a Mother

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

“Ocean Vuong comes home in his second full-length collection, exploring grief, violence, masculinity and queer life in America. Whether shoveling snow, reversing time, or losing his mother, Vuong will crack you open and heal you. 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

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

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

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

A Poetry Handbook

By: Mary Oliver
Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
Length: 3 hours 33 minutes

“Mary Oliver would probably never admit to anything so grandiose as an effort to connect the conscious mind and the heart (that’s what she says poetry can do), but that is exactly what she accomplishes in this stunning little handbook.”—Los Angeles TimesFrom the beloved, legendary poet, the ultimate guide to writing and understanding poetry.With... Read more

Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems

By: Dionne Brand
Narrated by: Dionne Brand & Christina Sharpe
Length: 13 hours 9 minutes

An immense achievement, comprising a decades-long career—new and collected poetry from one of Canada’s most honoured and significant poets.

Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, Winner
Toronto Book Award, Shortlist

Spanning almost four decades, Dionne Brand’s poetry has given rise to whole new grammars and vocabularies. With a profound alertness... Read more

The Universe in Verse

15 Portals to Wonder through Science & Poetry

By: Maria Popova
Length: TBA

The Universe in Verse is an ode to wonder and an exploration of the human search for truth and meaning. 

Poetry and science, as Popova writes in her introduction, "are instruments for knowing the world more intimately and loving it more deeply." In 15 short essays on subjects ranging from the mystery of dark matter and the infinity of pi to the... Read more

Billy Collins Live

A Performance at the Peter Norton Symphony Space April 20, 2005

By: Billy Collins
Narrated by: Billy Collins
Length: 1 hour 14 minutes

In this exclusive audio publishing event, Billy Collins, former U.S. Poet Laureate, shares an evening of his poetry in a benefit reading for WNYC, New York Public Radio. Often compared to Robert Frost, his poetry has been embraced by people of all ages and backgrounds, and his readings are most often standing room only.

Performed by the author... Read more

bone

By: Yrsa Daley-Ward
Narrated by: Yrsa Daley-Ward & Kiese Laymon
Length: 1 hour 35 minutes

“yrsa daley-ward’s bone is a symphony of breaking and mending. . . . she lays her hands on the pulse of the thing. . . . an expert storyteller. of the rarest. and purest kind.” —nayyirah waheed, author of salt.

From the celebrated poet Yrsa Daley-Ward, a poignant collection of poems about the heart, life, and the inner self.

Foreword by Kiese... Read more

Room Swept Home

By: Remica Bingham-Risher
Narrated by: Remica Bingham-Risher
Length: 2 hours 11 minutes

In a strange twist of kismet, Remica Bingham-Risher's paternal great-great-great grandmother, Minnie Lee Fowlkes, is interviewed for the Works Progress Administration Slave Narratives in Petersburg, Virginia in 1937, and her maternal grandmother, Mary Knight, is sent to Petersburg in 1941, diagnosed with "water on the brain"—postpartum... Read more

The Inferno

By: Dante
Narrated by: Dominic Hoffman
Length: 4 hours 40 minutes

“Probably the most finely accomplished and ... most enduring" translation (Los Angeles Times Book Review) of this essential work of world literature—from a renowned scholar and master teacher of Dante and an accomplished poet.

“The Hollanders … act as latter-day Virgils, guiding us through the Italian text that is printed on the facing... Read more

The Treasury of Victorian Poetry

Argo Classics

By: Robert Browning, Lord Alfred Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dante Gabriel Rossetti & Algernon Charles Swinburne
Narrated by: Sir John Gielgud, Peter Orr, Gwen Watford & David King
Length: 3 hours 4 minutes

William Collins Books and Decca Records are proud to present ARGO Classics, a historic catalogue of classic fiction read by some of the world’s most renowned voices. Originally released as vinyl records, these expertly abridged and remastered stories are now available to download for the first time. A... 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

Beowulf: A New Translation

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

“Fool that I was, I figured this was a revision of a prior translation of Beowulf and not a direct translation from the original text. I’ve never been more delighted to be wrong! The book reads so well on its own but it really takes flight when you listen to the audiobook. Hearing JD Jackson begin with ‘Bro! Tell me we still know how to speak of... 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Fortune For Your Disaster

Poems

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

“Hanif Abdurraquib’s powerful collection of poems explores the unending heartbreak of being black in America and how to find strength and self-actualization. Landscaped by graves, mirrors, and music these poems take the personal grief of being barked at by dogs and frames and re-frames those aggression into explorations on how our nation’s... 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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

I Would Leave Me If I Could.

A Collection of Poetry

By: Halsey
Narrated by: Halsey
Length: 1 hour 32 minutes

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

Gilgamesh

A New English Version

By: Stephen Mitchell
Narrated by: George Guidall & John McDonough
Length: 4 hours 5 minutes

This brilliant new treatment of the oldest epic in the world is a literary event. Esteemed translator and best-selling author Stephen Mitchell breathes life into a 3,700-year-old classic, delivering a lithe and muscular rendering that shows how startlingly alive Gilgamesh is, how filled with intelligence and beauty. It is the story of... Read more

The Popol Vuh

Seedbank

By: Michael Bazzett
Narrated by: Michael Bazzett
Length: 4 hours 11 minutes

A NEW YORK TIMES BEST POETRY BOOK OF 2018
A WORLD LITERATURE TODAY NOTABLE TRANSLATIONIn the beginning, the world is spoken into existence with one word: “Earth.” There are no inhabitants, and no sun—only the broad sky, silent sea, and sovereign Framer and Shaper. Then come the twin heroes Hunahpu and Xbalanque. Wielding blowguns, they begin a... 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

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

Beowulf - Abridged

By: author
Narrated by: Seamus Heaney
Length: 2 hours 13 minutes

A New York Times Bestseller and Whitbread Book of the Year.

Heaney's performance reminds us that Beowulf, written near the turn of another millennium, was intended to be heard not read.

Composed toward the end of the first millennium of our era, Beowulf is the elegiac narrative of the adventures of Beowulf, a Scandinavian hero who saves the Danes... Read more

Pirate Stew

By: Neil Gaiman
Narrated by: Neil Gaiman
Length: 10 minutes

Meet LONG JOHN McRON, SHIP'S COOK . . . and the most unusual babysitter you've ever seen. Long John has a whole crew of wild pirates in tow, and—for one boy and his sister—he's about to transform a perfectly ordinary evening into a riotous adventure beneath a pirate moon. It's time to make some PIRATE STEW. Marvelously silly and gloriously... Read more

Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass

By: Lana Del Rey
Narrated by: Lana Del Rey
Length: 38 minutes

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

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

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

Black Girl, Call Home

By: Jasmine Mans
Narrated by: Jasmine Mans
Length: 1 hour 50 minutes

“This collection. Have you ever closed a book and suddenly felt that all that you are, all that you've seen has somehow been made tangible through another's voice? Have you ever felt called in to let go, to be heard, and to be seen? That is what Mans has done here. I will forever hold onto the beautiful ways in which Jasmine pulls apart and gives... Read more

Rilke

Selected Poems

By: Rainer Rilke
Narrated by: Stephen Mitchell
Length: 1 hour 55 minutes

Rainer Maria Rilke has been called the most significant and compelling poet of spiritual experience of the 20th century. His exploration of the struggle between life and art and the supremacy of divine love over personal love has touched the hearts of men and women everywhere. The poems in this reading are from the selected poetry of Rainer... Read more

Autobiography of Red

Vintage Contemporaries

By: Anne Carson
Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
Length: 3 hours 55 minutes

The award-winning poet Anne Carson reinvents a genre in Autobiography of Red, a stunning work that is both a novel and a poem, both an unconventional recreation of an ancient Greek myth and a wholly original coming-of-age story set in the present.

Geryon, a young boy who is also a winged red monster, reveals the volcanic terrain of his fragile,... Read more