Showing results by publisher "Recorded Books" in Themes & Styles

When Kevin Powell's elderly mother became ill, he returned home ever week to take her grocery shopping in Jersey City. Walking behind her during those trips, Powell began to hear her voice, stories, and language in a new way—and examined his own healing while praying for hers. Grocery Shopping with My Mother originated as social media posts about these visits and evolved into a breathtaking collection of thirty-two new poems, crafted like an album, plus four bonus tracks celebrating a great love of wordplay.

Subverting celebrated classics of poetry and mythology and examining horrors from contemporary film and cultural fact, National Book Award-winner Justin Phillip Reed engages darkness as an aesthetic to conjure the revenant animus that lurks beneath the exploited civilities of marginalized people. In these poems, Reed finds agency in the other-than-human identities assigned to those assaulted by savageries of the state. In doing so, he summons a retaliatory, counterviolent black spirit to revolt and to inhabit the revolting. 

Indecency is boldly and carefully executed and perfectly ragged. In these poems, Justin Phillip Reed experiments with language to explore inequity and injustice and to critique and lament the culture of white supremacy and the dominant social order. Political and personal, tender, daring, and insightful - the author unpacks his intimacies, weaponizing poetry to take on masculinity, sexuality, exploitation, and the prison industrial complex and unmask all the failures of the structures into which society sorts us.

I Climb the Mesas: Collected Poems of Paula Gunn Allen span the landscapes of the Southwest, excavate popular misunderstandings of Native women through history, and perhaps most importantly shines a light on a foremother of Native poetry, who was herself an icon to feminist legends like Gloria Steinem.

Southern Bred is a haunting, powerful collection of gothic poems that captivate and transport the listener into the heart and soul of the Deep South. Each poem offers a glimpse into its mystery and enchantment, drawing you in with a blend of beauty and darkness. In the style of a memoir in verse, it showcases Ghigna’s southern soul and his tender, yet piercing language, and affirms his place as one of the finest poets of our time.

Freedom reverberates in Skye Jackson’s breathtaking debut, Libre, with evocative poems that are heart-wrenching, haunting, sensual, and tender. This collection explores the experiences of a young Black woman in New Orleans as she navigates the pull of familial and romantic relationships, celebrating the joys of Blackness, art, and friendship. Libre also includes Jackson’s award-winning poem “can we touch your hair?” which was hand selected by former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins for inclusion in the Library of Congress Poetry 180 Project.