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Listen to Poetry Poetry E-audiobooks @ MVCC Library

Modern poetry evolved form earlier spoken forms, and there is still something special about hearing poetry read aloud. This collection brings together emerging and established voices, with selections intended to appeal to new and seasoned poetry readers--and all of these audiobooks are narrated by the poets themselves!

Need help accessing these resources? Check out our E-Resources Page or Ask a Librarian!

The Tradition by Jericho Brown

Read by JD Jackson

"Beauty abounds in Jericho Brown’s Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry collection... The Tradition questions why and how we’ve become accustomed to terror: in the bedroom, the classroom, the workplace, and the movie theater. From mass shootings to rape to the murder of unarmed people by police, Brown interrupts complacency by locating each emergency in the garden of the body, where living things grow and wither—or survive." --Publisher description

The Carrying by Ada Limón

Read by Ada Limón

"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... Limón shows us, as ever, the persistence of hunger, love, and joy, the dizzying fullness of our too-short lives. “Fine then, / I’ll take it,” she writes. “I’ll take it all.” --Publisher description

An American Sunrise by Joy Harjo

Read by Joy Harjo

"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 returns to her family’s lands and opens a dialogue with history. In An American Sunrise, Harjo finds blessings in the abundance of her homeland and confronts the site where her people, and other indigenous families, essentially disappeared." --Publisher description

IRL by Tommy Pico

Read by Tommy Pico

"RL is a sweaty, summertime poem composed like a long text message, rooted in the epic tradition of A.R. Ammons, ancient Kumeyaay Bird Songs, and Beyoncé's visual albums. It follows Teebs, a reservation-born, queer NDN weirdo, trying to figure out his impulses/desires/history in the midst of Brooklyn rooftops, privacy in the age of the Internet, street harassment, suicide, boys boys boys, literature, colonialism, religion, leaving one's 20s, and a love/hate relationship with English."--Publisher description

Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur

Read by Rupi Kaur

"The book is divided into four chapters, and each chapter serves a different purpose. Deals with a different pain. Heals a different heartache. milk and honey takes readers through a journey of the most bitter moments in life and finds sweetness in them because there is sweetness everywhere if you are just willing to look." --Publisher description

Don't Call Us Dead by Danez Smith

Read by Danez Smith

"Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don’t Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth... Don’t Call Us Dead is an astonishing collection, one that confronts America where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle." --Publisher description

Life of Mars by Tracy K. Smith

Read by Tracy K. Smith

"With allusions to David Bowie and interplanetary travel, Life on Mars imagines a soundtrack for the universe to accompany the discoveries, failures, and oddities of human existence. 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 ground, where a daughter is imprisoned in the basement by her own father, where celebrities and pop stars walk among us, and where the poet herself loses her father, one of the engineers who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope." --Publisher description

The Twenty-Ninth Year by Hala Alyan

Read by Hala Alyan

"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, subversive verse sifts together and through different forms of forced displacement and the tolls they take on mind and body. Poems leap from war-torn cities in the Middle East, to an Oklahoma Olive Garden, a Brooklyn brownstone; from alcoholism to recovery; from a single woman to a wife. This collection summons breathtaking chaos, one that seeps into the bones of these odes, the shape of these elegies." --Publisher description

Native Guard by Natasha Trethewey

Ready by January LaVoy and Neal A. Ghant

"Based on Natasha Trethewey’s collection of poems, The Alliance Theatre’s production of Native Guard is both an elegy to her mother and a journey into Mississippi’s Civil War history. In poetry and song, she reflects on her mother’s passing while contemplating the former slaves who became soldiers in a regiment known as the Native Guard. Trethewey’s work was the winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry." --Publisher Description

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