English Poetry

Here is an audiobook of the hugely successful Josephine Hart Poetry Hours at the British Library. Actors such as Roger Moore and Juliet Stevenson read poetry from Auden to Eliot and from Larkin to Plath.

Set in Pennsylvania's Amish country, The Revelation is the final chapter in the saga of Jonas Mast and Leah Ebersol's inspirational love story. Forces continue to try to keep them apart, but nothing can deny their love.

An accomplished poet and the author of Canadian Hungarian Literature (1897 - 2017), Frank Veszely brings to the English listener the rich treasure-house of folk, classical, and modern Hungarian poetry (1000 - 2020).

Ovid's sensuous and witty poem brings together a dazzling array of mythological tales, ingeniously linked by the idea of transformation, often as a result of love or lust, in which men and women find themselves magically changed into new and sometimes extraordinary beings. Beginning with the creation of the world and ending with the deification of Augustus, Ovid interweaves many of the best known myths and legends of ancient Greece and Rome.

From spoken word poet Jasmine Mans comes an unforgettable poetry collection about race, feminism, and queer identity. With echoes of Gwendolyn Brooks and Sonia Sanchez, Mans writes to call herself - and us - home. Each poem 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. Black Girl, Call Home is a love letter to the wandering Black girl and a vital companion to any woman on a journey to find truth, belonging, and healing.

With Hutchins’s trademark sensory and evocative language throughout, Make Believe contains both viral spoken-word pieces and never-before-shared writing. Ultimately pointing listeners toward transformation, Hutchins invites you to imagine: What would happen if you allowed yourself to believe again—in dreams and miracles, but mostly in yourself?

Poems, essays, and prompts to sing a new world into being—Queer & BIPOC perspectives on poetry as an insurgent ritual for manifesting liberation and reclaiming power.

Performance poet Sabrina Benaim presents Depression & Other Magic Tricks, a collection of poems that explores themes of mental health, love, and family. It is a documentation of struggle and triumph, a celebration of daily life and of living.

Part manifesto, part memoir, This Wound Is a World is an invitation to “cut a hole in the sky / to world inside”. Belcourt issues a call to turn to love and sex to understand how Indigenous peoples shoulder their sadness and pain without giving up on the future. His poems upset genre and play with form, scavenging for a decolonial kind of heaven where “everyone is at least a little gay”.

“What Breaks Us” by Megan Davis is a cathartic collection of poetry that channels pain and angst into strength for healing and self-discovery. This poetry collection is a candid reflection on heartache, loss, and the difficult work of self-examination to uncover unhealed wounds. With topics ranging from love to spirituality, grief to psychology, Davis’s poetry is an outpouring of emotion that balances the deeply personal with the universality of the human experience.

Over the past two decades, Jessica Care moore has become a cultural force as a poet, performer, publisher, activist, and critic. Reflecting her transcendent electric voice, this searing poetry collection is filled with moving, original stanzas that speak to both Black women’s creative and intellectual power, and express the pain, sadness, and anger of those who suffer constant scrutiny because of their gender and race.

An anthology of verse by women poets writing in Persian, most of whom have never been translated into English before, from acclaimed scholar and translator Dick Davis. From Rabe'eh in the 10th century to Fatemeh Ekhtesari in the 21st, the women poets found in The Mirror of My Heart write across the millennium on such universal topics as marriage, children, political climate, death, and emancipation, recreating life from hundreds of years ago that is strikingly similar to our own today and giving insight into their experiences as women.

Wordsworth's The Prelude is the consummation of his achievement as the great founder of English romanticism. An autobiography in verse, it tells of his childhood in the Lake District, his student days in Cambridge, his passion for the French Revolution and his later disenchantment with it. It also tells of his personal journey to a belief in Nature as the great moral and spiritual force which shapes human life, but on which human society all too often turns its back.

A collection of over 200 pieces of poetry and prose, The Secret of You focuses on the thoughts and feelings that we might not share and have trouble expressing, the things that we need to let go in order to heal. Thomas’s newest volume asks and answers vulnerable questions on themes of love, loss, identity, shame, and more. This audiobook features original commentary by the author, reflecting on his writing and his process.

The most captivating part of perhaps the greatest epic poem ever written, Dante's Inferno still holds the power to thrill and inspire. The medieval equivalent of a thriller, Inferno follows Dante and his faithful guide, Virgil, as they traverse the complex geography of hell, confronting its many threats, macabre punishments, and historical figures before reaching the deep chamber where Satan himself resides.

The Argonautica, also known as Jason and the Golden Fleece or Jason and the Argonauts, is the only surviving epic poem from Hellenistic Greece. It is a masterpiece whose story was well known to the audiences of the time. Virgil and other later poets were greatly influenced by it. Its author, Apollonius, was a well-known third century BC scholar living in Alexandria during the great age of Ptolomaic scholarship, and his bold attempt at writing a Homeric epic about Jason and his quest for the Golden Fleece faced a daunting audience of knowledgeable contemporaries.

Beowulf is the greatest surviving work of literature in Old English, unparalleled in its epic grandeur and scope. It tells the story of the heroic Beowulf and of his battles, first with the monster Grendel, who has laid waste to the great hall of the Danish king Hrothgar, then with Grendel's avenging mother and finally with a dragon that threatens to devastate his homeland.

In this deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of personal and social loss, embodying the paradox of sitting in grief while being determined to survive beyond it. Shifting through memory, and in concert with the themes of his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong contends with the meaning of family and the cost of being the product of an American war in America. At once vivid, brave, and propulsive, these poems circle fragmented lives to find both restoration as well as the epicenter of the break.

The Smeds (who are red) never mix with the Smoos (who are blue). So when a young Smed and Smoo fall in love, their families strongly disapprove. But peace is restored and love conquers all in this happiest of love stories. There’s even a gorgeous purple baby to celebrate!

Indulge in Rumi's passion with this collection of 13th century love poetry. Become lost in the words of The Love Poems of Rumi. Included in this audiobook is a collection of Jalal al-Din Rumi's passionate love poems, translated by Nader Khalili. Beautifully read by Neil Shah, you'll become spiritually inspired by the words in this audiobook. Perfect for lovers, dreamers, and poets, the poems from this 13th century theologist will leave you wistfully peaceful.