Showing results by publisher "Random House Audio" in Poetry

It has been twenty-eight years since Sandra Cisneros published a book of poetry. With dozens of never-before-seen poems, Woman Without Shame is a moving collection of songs, elegies, and declarations that chronicle her pilgrimage toward rebirth and the recognition of her prerogative as a woman artist. These bluntly honest and often humorous meditations on memory, desire, and the essential nature of love blaze a path toward self-awareness. For Cisneros, Woman Without Shame is the culmination of her search for home—in the Mexico of her ancestors and in her own heart.

Grace, dignity, and eloquence have long been hallmarks of Maya Angelou's poetry. Her measured verses have stirred our souls, energized our minds, and healed our hearts. Whether offering hope in the darkest of nights or expressing sincere joy at the extraordinariness of the everyday, Maya Angelou has served as our common voice.

Dispute over land and kingdom may lie at the heart of this story of war between cousins - the Pandavas and the Kouravas - but the Mahabharata is about conflicts of dharma. These conflicts are immense and various, singular and commonplace. Throughout the epic, characters face them with no clear indications of what is right and what is wrong; there are no absolute answers. Thus every possible human emotion features in the Mahabharata, the reason the epic continues to hold sway over our imagination.

These poems consider the brevity and disposability of Black lives and other oppressed people in our current era of emboldened white supremacy, and the use of the Black vernacular in America’s vast reserve of racial and gendered epithets. Finna explores the erasure of peoples in the American narrative; asks how gendered language can provoke violence; and finally, how the Black vernacular, expands our notions of possibility, giving us a new language of hope: nothing about our people is romantic and it shouldn’t be.

In this delightful collection, Ruskin Bond introduces us to the Dehradun he knows intimately and loves unreservedly - the town in which he had spent many years of his childhood and youth. A town which, when he knew it, was one of pony-drawn tongas and rickshaws; a town fond of gossip but tolerant of human foibles; a town of lush lichi trees; charming winter gardens and cool streams; a small town; a sleepy town; a town called "Dehra".

In this exclusive audio publishing event, Billy Collins, former U.S. Poet Laureate, shares an evening of his poetry in a benefit reading for WNYC, New York Public Radio. Often compared to Robert Frost, his poetry has been embraced by people of all ages and backgrounds, and his readings are most often standing room only.

I Had A Brother Once is a brilliant, genre-defying work - both memoir and epic poem - about the struggle for wisdom, grace, and ritual in the face of unspeakable loss. Adam is forced to re-remember a brother he thought he knew and to reckon with a ghost, confronting his unsettled family history, his distant relationship with tradition and faith, and his desperate need to understand an event that always slides just out of his grasp.

Beautifully composed and written by international best-selling author Lang Leav, this new collection of poetry and prose will positively influence your life.

The Sikh religion was founded by Guru Nanak (1469-1539), who drew upon the teachings of Muslim, Sufis, and Hindu Bhaktas. In its purest form Sikhism is about unity, simplicity, equality, and surrender (to God) and the verses of the Sikh Gurus - most of them included in the Granth Sahib - articulate this beautifully. This elegant edition contains a selection of verses from the Guru Granth Sahib and other sacred texts like Guru Tegh Bahadur’s Vairagmayi Bani and the Dasam Granth of Guru Gobind Singh.

Ghalib's poetic trajectory begins from Urdu, then moves to composing almost entirely in Persian and finally swings back to Urdu. It is nearly as complex as his poetry. However, his poetic output in Persian is far more than what he wrote in Urdu. More important is that he gave precedence to Persian over Urdu. Ghalib's voice presents us with a double bind, a linguistic paradox. Exploring his life, works and philosophy, this authoritative critical biography of Ghalib opens a window to many shades of India and the subcontinent's cultural and literary tradition.

Dispute over land and kingdom may lie at the heart of this story of war between cousins - the Pandavas and the Kouravas - but the Mahabharata is about conflicts of dharma. These conflicts are immense and various, singular and commonplace. Throughout the epic, characters face them with no clear indications of what is right and what is wrong; there are no absolute answers. Thus every possible human emotion features in the Mahabharata, the reason the epic continues to hold sway over our imagination.

This marvelous collection opens with the practical wisdom and unforgettable wit of the poet’s grandmother, who said (among other things) “Turmeric can heal anything / but a broken heart” and “Read that to me at / my funeral, boy, right now my show is on.” From the foundation of the matriarchal, Majmudar turns to the impact of women as lovers and partners, exploring the contours of passionate, romantic, and married love; he and his wife are “two fireflies/ scooped out of the same evening” to meet in the jar where their constancy contains and sustains them.

The deliciously book-length story of "The Vineyard" is set in and around the little house in Oyster Ponds where the poet spends the summer months. In freeflowing lines and pages that turn with the calendar, the poem unspools impressions that seem confided rather than written, as Galassi observes the "pretend peace'' of this quiet village house and garden, his oasis in the great swirl of dailiness.

After storming the scene with Stereo(TYPE), the PEN America Award–winning poet makes his highly anticipated return—with a virtuosic sophomore collection that plunges the reader into the tenebrous realm between dreams and reality, and firmly establishes him as an essential voice in American poetry.

Elegant, profound, and intoxicating—Spectral Evidence, Gregory Pardlo’s first major collection of poetry after winning the Pulitzer Prize for Digest, moves fluidly among considerations of the pro-wrestler Owen Hart; Tituba, the only Black woman to be accused of witchcraft during the Salem witch trials; MOVE, the movement and militant separatist group famous for its violent stand-offs with the Philadelphia Police Department (“flames rose like orchids . . . / blocks lay open like egg cartons”); and more.

Unsung, Arunoday Singh’s first volume of poetry, presents a collection of his most popular work alongside new material, where he delves inwards and probes questions of love, loss, longing—everything that ails the human heart. He has amassed a large, involved following on Instagram, where he shares his poetry in handwritten calligraphy under the handle @sufisoul. The poems are deceptively simple and intensely piercing. They are divided into four sections that explore the themes of the self, the elements, breaking and healing, the search for divinity, and the light and darkness of the spirit.

A world-bending, lyrically rich poetry collection that reimagines the U.S.-Mexico border as both a real place and a living simulation—and tells the story of a pair of siblings trapped between the two.

Fever of Unknown Origin opens at a remote crossroads, where the speaker considers the intersection of history, beauty, and destruction: “the past / is paper / and the present, a match . . .” What follows is an urgent tour of landscapes—environmental, political, and personal—that reframes our perception of modern America and leads the listener into “An empire of rags and photons” where we must look to the past to clarify our futures.

With the publication of her first book of poems in her sixty-third year, Amy Clampitt rose meteorically to fame, launching herself from obscurity to the upper ranks of American poetry all but overnight, and living a whirlwind eleven years, until her death in 1994. Years later, as renowned poetry scholar Willard Spiegelman wades into her papers and poems, he discovers a woman of dazzling intellect, staunch progressive politics, and an inexhaustible sense of wonder for the world and the words we’ve invented to describe it.

In this powerful gathering of poems about her own "influencers," as well as poems on Dadaist artist Meret Oppenheim and the young choreographer Lauren Lovette, Brenda Shaughnessy dwells in memories of the women who set her on her artistic path. In flowing stair-step tercets, Shaughnessy leads us down into her generative core, exposing moments of spiritual and intellectual awakening, her love of art and the written word, and her sense of the life force itself, which is ignited by the conversation—across time and space—with other women.