Showing titles in Themes & Styles

This imaginative and singular poetry collection interrogates the broadest ideas surrounding the humble pig—farm animal, men/masculinity, police and state violence, desire, queerness, global food systems, religion/Judaism and law—to reimagine various chaotic histories of the body, faith, ecology, desire, hygiene, and power. Sam Sax draws on autobiography and history to create poems that explore topics ranging from drag queens and Miss Piggy to pig farming and hog lagoons.

Najwa Zebian: The Collected Poems is an audio collection of Zebian's bestselling poetry, including the full text of Mind Platter, The Nectar of Pain, and Sparks of Phoenix. This bundled audiobook allows listeners to access all of Zebian’s moving work in one place, in the author’s own voice.

A beautiful selection of poems from a young man who would become a brilliant author and essayist, a thinker who was very much at the forefront of changes in the twentieth century. Here is a book that could be carried in your pocket and enjoyed quickly—a poem of innocent love or remembrance of events that make the boy become the man.

It is clear that the author is madly in love, not only with her partner for whom she writes both idiosyncratic and sultry poems, but in love with language, in love with queerness, in love with the therapeutic process of bankrupting the politics of shame. These poems tackle gun violence, toxic masculinity, LGBTQ* struggles, suicidality, and the oppression of women’s bodies, while maintaining a vivid wildness that the tongue aches to speak aloud.

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.

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 in the present. Werewolves, sirens and dreams make their appearance, as do various forms of animal life and fragments of our damaged environment.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's plea to her lover to love her just for herself, and not for any qualities that may fade away, read by Jenny Agutter.

Whilst the notion of the Mystic East and Oriental wisdom was greatly romanticised by the Victorians and others, the shadow of Colonialism has smudged the view. These great cultures are some of humanity’s earliest, their works, their art some of its most daring and most accomplished. In these 50 poems across 50 poets we hope, at least in part, to rebalance our view of this subject. We begin in the 6th century BC and travel with a poet’s words and eyes across India, China, Persia and many other places in between.

Thyestes is a tragic rendition of the fraternal civil war within House Atreides. This 1st century A.D. play was written by the Stoic philosopher Seneca and has been translated into readable prose for a 21st century audience.

Dispute over land and kingdom may lie at the heart of this story of war between cousins - the Pandavas and the Kouravas - but the Mahabharata is about conflicts of dharma. These conflicts are immense and various, singular and commonplace. Throughout the epic, characters face them with no clear indications of what is right and what is wrong; there are no absolute answers. Thus every possible human emotion features in the Mahabharata, the reason the epic continues to hold sway over our imagination.

Soul Speaking is a collection of emotional poetry straight from the soul. Every human emotion from love to hate, joy to grief, celebrating newfound friendships to healing from toxic people, is captured in these free verse poems. Whether these words haunt you or heal you, their beauty, depth, and power will certainly never leave you.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's classic poem about a sailor who shot an albatross and the woe that followed him afterwards. Narrated by professional voice actor Jake Phillips, host of The Cultured Bumpkin literature podcast.

John Donne's famous poem about two lovers surprised by the astonishingly rapid arrival of sunrise, read by Bill Wallis.

In her first book, happy-go-lucky YouTuber and Instagrammer Emma Conway explores motherhood in all its glory through the medium of hilarious and uplifting poetry. A mum to two young humans aged seven and nine, she revisits the days of no sleep, potty training and toddler tantrums; dives deep into first days of school, sibling bickering and watching your babies grow into little people; and writes frankly about life after having kids, embracing the mum bod and giving zero sods.

Like System of a Down's multi-platinum-selling second album, Toxicity - hailed by Rolling Stone as "a bouquet of smart rock and ardent social argument" and by SPIN as "the sound of now" - Tankian's poetic style is willfully eclectic. Sometimes introspective, sometimes direct and cutting, these poems deal with subjects as wide-ranging as euthanasia and the nature of time itself.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of bone written and read by Yrsa Daley-Ward. Observer book of the year 2017. 'You will come away bruised. You will come away bruised but this will give you poetry.' Raw and stark, the poems in Yrsa Daley-Ward's breakthrough collection strip down her reflections on the heart, life, the inner self, coming of age, faith and loss to their essence. They resonate to the core of experience.

Rachel Long’s much anticipated debut collection of poems, My Darling from the Lions, announces the arrival of a thrilling new presence in poetry. Each poem has a vivid story to tell - of family quirks, the perils of dating, the grip of religion or sexual awakening - stories that are, by turn, emotionally insightful, politically conscious, wise, funny and outrageous.

A meditative journey of the nervous system experience through the lens of The Polyvagal Theory—the listener moves through the different nervous system states and the 'felt' experience of dysregulation. The author shares co-regulation techniques to empower and furnish the listener with the self-help tools to shift nervous system states. Its meditative structure aims to reduce anxiety, depression, and traumatic stress, while creating mental wellness and emotional security.

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 daughter tends to aging parents. A woman struggles with infertility—“What if, instead of carrying / a child, I am supposed to carry grief?”—and a body seized by pain and vertigo as well as ecstasy. A nation convulses: “Every song of this country / has an unsung third stanza, something brutal.” And still Limón shows us, as ever, the persistence of hunger, love, and joy, the dizzying fullness of our too-short lives.

Poetry is often cited as our greatest use of words. The English language has well over a million of them and poets down the ages seem, at times, to make use of every single one. But often they use them in simple ways to describe anything and everything from landscapes to all aspects of the human condition. Poems can evoke within us an individual response that takes us by surprise; that opens our ears and eyes to very personal feelings.