English Poetry

The little red hen finds none of the lazy barnyard animals willing to help her plant, harvest, or grind wheat into flour, but all are eager to eat the bread she makes from it.

Crafting together the power of words and womanhood, writer Tanya Markul has written a completely unique poetry collection fit for the phenomenal listeners of today. In Tanya's words, "May we raise the bar for how we live our lives. May we ridiculously increase the amount of peace, play, creativity, beauty, love, and joy in everything we do. May we all sip from the wisdom of our suffering. And awaken with the courage to share our stories that can heal our inner and outer worlds."

From Malawian storyteller Upile Chisala comes a collection of poetry and prose exploring the self, joy, Blackness, gender, matters of the heart, spirituality, the experience of Diaspora, and above all, how we survive. Told in five parts, soft magic is a shared healing journey.

Since its release as a small mixed-media podcast, DKMH has topped charts all over the internet. Written and produced by Stranger Things star Dacre Montgomery, the DKMH platform is expanding to print. This exciting debut collection of poetry and prose is an analysis of ego, love, anger, and anxiety. Each poem investigates our individual driving forces and how experiences shape us into the humans we are, deeply personal yet strangely familiar and universal.

The intellectual and cultural revival of African-American arts and politics in the 1920s and 1930s was centered in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City. Here are poems from three major contributors to that rebirth: The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes, The Heart of a Woman and Other Poems by Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Copper Sun by Countee Cullen, delivered by three multiaward–winning narrators.

The three books that compose this audiobook are collections of Gibran's aphorisms, parables, and poetic essays. The works include his masterpiece, The Prophet, The Forerunner, and The Madman.

My Greenhouse is a collection of poems inspired by the author's first romance, beginning with the seeds of infatuation, blooming for a time into real love, and then eventually dying back, making room for new growth. The pieces evoke the feelings of enchantment, uncertainty, pain, and ultimately healing that come with your first love and heartbreak.

How could George write a poem? He wasn't a poet. But then George touches down in the Land of Hogs: Poetry Pig Farm! Pigs William Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson help George learn to become a poet.

In this exquisite poetry collection, Whitney Hanson chronicles the loss of a loved one, tracing the progression of grief and healing through the lens of music. We each begin with a simple note, but as life progresses, we’re led to the next note, and the next—all of which combine to form the melody of a song and a life. As life becomes more complicated and complex, we find that loss, grief, and heartache can muffle our music, making the world go silent.

In her second poetry collection, Barbara Kingsolver offers reflections on the practical, the spiritual, and the wild. She begins with "how to" poems addressing everyday matters such as being hopeful, married, divorced; shearing a sheep; praying to unreliable gods; doing nothing at all; and of course, flying. Next come rafts of poems about making peace (or not) with the complicated bonds of friendship and family, and making peace (or not) with death, in the many ways it finds us.

A cannon. A strap. Or, you can call it a gun. That's what 15-year-old Will has shoved in the back waistband of his jeans. See, his brother Shawn was just murdered. And Will knows the rules. No crying. No snitching. Revenge. That's where Will's now heading, with that gun shoved in the back waistband of his jeans, the gun that was his brother's gun. He gets on the elevator, seventh floor, stoked. He knows who he's after. Or does he?

The Iliad is one of the most enduring creations of Western Civilization and was originally written to be recited or chanted to the accompaniment of various instruments. Properly performed, this work today is just as meaningful, just as powerful, and just as entertaining as it was in the ninth century BC, and it casts its spell upon modern listeners with the same raw intensity as it did upon the people of ancient times.

Nature Poem follows Teebs - a young, queer, American Indian (or NDN) poet - who can't bring himself to write a nature poem. For the reservation-born, urban-dwelling hipster, the exercise feels stereotypical, reductive, and boring. He hates nature. He prefers city lights to the night sky. He'd slap a tree across the face. He'd rather write a mountain of hashtag punchlines about death and give head in a pizza-parlor bathroom; he'd rather write odes to Aretha Franklin and Hole.

From Tiktok phenomenon Whitney Hanson comes a revised edition of her bestselling Home, now with a new introduction and more than a dozen new poems. Resonant, raw, and vibrant, Home is a lyrical map to navigating heartbreak. Tracing the stages of healing—from the despair that comes with the end of a relationship to the eventual light and liberation that comes with time—the poems in Home provide comfort and solace, while revitalizing your soul—and helping you make peace with your bees.

Robert Fitzgerald's translation of The Odyssey has been the standard translation for more than three generations of students and poets. Macmillan Audio is delighted to publish the first ever audio edition of this classic work, the greatest of all epic poems. Fitzgerald's supple verse is ideally suited for audio, recounting the story of Odysseus' long journey back to his wife and home after the Trojan War. Homer's tale of love, adventure, food and drink, sensual pleasure, and mortal danger reaches the English-language listener in all its glory.

Ted Hughes married Sylvia Plath in 1956, at the outset of their brilliant careers. Plath's suicide six-and-a-half years later, for which many held Hughes accountable, changed his life, his closest relationships, his standing in the literary world, and brought new significance to his poetry.

Beloved by her fans, special to the poet’s own heart, Mary Oliver’s dog poems offer a special window into her world. Mary Oliver’s Dog Songs is a celebration of the special bond between human and dog, as understood through the poet’s relationships to the canines that have accompanied her daily walks, warmed her home, and inspired her work. In A Thousand Mornings, Mary Oliver returns to the imagery that has come to define her life’s work, transporting us to the marshland and coastline of her beloved home, Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Rudyard Kipling. With our almost religious zeal to categorise and pigeon hole everything it should come as little surprise that one of the poems we learnt at school should so regularly be voted the best ever poem. Whether ‘If..’ deserves that credit or not is irrelevant to this empire wandering artist who was not only a fine story teller but a great poet of the Empires, its people and views.

A dirty, skinny, dog shows up in Sam and Katie's neighborhood. They start to follow it, and they don't like what they see: The Wilson sisters yell at it because it goes in their garden and the Tracy twins chase it on their bikes and throw things at it. Sam and Katie want the dog to know they'll be its friends. They think it should have a name. Most of all, they want it to like them. But then they do something thoughtless, and after that, it's hard to make things right, especially because the dog now won't come near them.

Paul Fleischman's Poems for Two Voices make for irresistable listening. Whether funny, sad, boisterous or serene, each poem is a virtuoso performance - skillfully illuminating a unique personality from the natural world.