Contemporary American Poetry

An anthology of over 50 classic poems, read by some of our finest actors. This collection contains a selection of the very best poems, from verses inspired by love to war poetry, nature poems and children's rhymes.

You’re Not a Girl in a Movie is a new collection of powerful poems by Hala Alyan, winner of the Arab American Book Award in Poetry and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. In these nine extraordinary poems, Alyan wrestles with the intimate themes that have driven her acclaimed body of work to date: the aching loss of homeland, the image and worth of women, and the violence of love. In Beirut, Brooklyn, and roads in the American West, she unravels the effects of decades of war and displacement on love and human worth and identity.

For anyone who's in love - or hopes to be - what greater celebration could there be than to hear the world's greatest love poetry read lovingly by Richard Armitage? With 13 poems by William Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and more, Classic Love Poems is a listening treat for Valentine's Day - or any day.

An anthology of over 60 classic love poems, read by some of our finest actors. Love has always been the supreme inspiration for poets, whether romantic or platonic, reciprocated or unrequited. This collection contains a range of the very best love poems, including Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress", Keats' "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" and Byron's "So We'll Go No More A-Roving" - as well as several sonnets from the master himself, William Shakespeare.

Spanning time, styles, and traditions, a dazzling collection of essential works from 140 Latine writers, scholars, and activists from across the world—from warrior poet Audre Lorde to novelist Edwidge Danticat and performer and author Elizabeth Acevedo and artist/poet Cecilia...

A rich, accomplished, intensely intimate collection with 2 full sections of new poems bookending Blanco’s selections from his 5 previous volumes “An engineer, poet, Cuban American . . . his poetry bridges cultures and languages—a mosaic of our past, our present, and our future—reflecting...

"In much of the best contemporary poetry, beauty of thought is at least as important as beauty of language. Carl Phillips, here reading his own Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, has an ample supply of both, but it is the thinking behind each poem that makes it possible for the language to have...

"Where are you from . . . ? No—where are you from from?" It's a question every Asian American gets asked as part of an incessant chorus saying you'll never belong here, you're a perpetual foreigner, you'll always be seen as an alien, an object, or a threat. Monica Youn's From From brilliantly evokes the conflicted consciousness of deracination. If you have no core of "authenticity," no experience of your so-called homeland, how do you piece together an Asian American identity out of Westerners' ideas about Asians? Your sense of yourself is part stereotype, part aspiration, part guilt.

From award-winning poet and novelist Phillip B. Williams, an astonishing new collection that revels in the possibility of creating one's own light Captivating for both its grandeur and intimacy, Lift Every Voice explores the capacity for the past to be both a source of dread and empowerment, an...

“Book of Longing has exceptional range. It is clear yet steamy, cosmic yet private, both playful and profound.”—New York Times Leonard Cohen wrote the poems in Book of Longing—his first book of poetry in more than twenty years after 1984's Book of Mercy—during his five-year stay at a...

This program is read by the author. A selection of poems from the celebrated poet and lawyer Beginning with his first book, Shouting at No One, from 1983, and continuing through to So Where Are We?, from 2017, A Certain Clarity provides a generous selection of Lawrence Joseph’s poetry “of...

This program is read by the author. A stunning new collection from a “beguiling and magisterial” poet (The New York Times Book Review) This is the End of Days. This is what we’ve been waiting for always. I walked over to the Hudson River, heading for Mars. Each poem of mine is a suicide...

A humorous and heartwarming bounce-to-the-beat underdog story about a young rapper whose rhymes help bring his community together, from America's favorite rapping teacher. As featured on Good Morning America! Eleven-year-old Simon Barnes dreams of becoming a world-famous rapper that everyone...

From the author of The Arsonists’ City and The Twenty-Ninth Year, a new collection of poetry that traces the fragmentation of memory, archive, and family–past, present, future–in the face of displacement and war. A diaspora of memories runs through this poetry collection—a multiplicity...

A breathtaking poetry collection on hope, heart, and heritage from the most prominent and promising Black poets and writers of our time, edited by #1 New York Times bestselling author Kwame Alexander. In this comprehensive and vibrant poetry anthology, bestselling author and poet Kwame Alexander...

This program is read by the author. A rich and challenging new collection from the young award-winning poet. In those days I began to see light under every bushel basket, light nearly splitting the sides of the bushel basket. Light came through the rafters of the dairy where the grackles...

A brilliant, genre-defying work—both memoir and epic poem—about the struggle for wisdom, grace, and ritual in the face of unspeakable loss “A bruised and brave love letter from a brother right here to a brother now gone . . . a soaring, unblinking gaze into the meaning of life itself...

A wondrous collection from Billy Collins, former U.S. Poet Laureate and New York Times bestselling author of The Rain in Portugal “The poems are marked by his characteristic humor and arise out of small, banal moments, unearthing the extraordinary or uncanny in the everyday.”—The Wall...

Bloomsbury presents Unsafe, written and read by Karen McCarthy Woolf, POETRY BOOK SOCIETY CHOICE The third collection from T. S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted poet, essayist and editor Karen McCarthy Woolf 'A work of intense epiphany' ROGER ROBINSON 'Unsafe will stay with me forever' SAFIA ELHILLO 'As...

An Instant New York Times Bestseller The author of the #1 New York Times bestseller What Kind of Woman returns with a collection of erasure poems created from notes she received from followers, supporters and detractors—an artform that reclaims the vitriol from online trolls and inspires...