Showing results by publisher "Recorded Books" in Poetry

Surviving the Trojan War was just the beginning of the adventure for Odysseus. What lay ahead was a journey home that would last for years as he encountered gods and monsters before finally returning home - only to face the greatest threat to his happiness of all. This translation of Homer's classic tale captures all the timeless excitement and gripping drama that have made it a favorite for centuries.

The smiling Buddha, or the Buddha of laughter, was a vagabond monk in the 10th cenury. Known as Pu Tai in China and Hotei in Japan, he found supreme happiness one stormy day under a bridge after a loud thunderclap illuminated his purpose. From that day forward, he traveled throughout China sharing his wisdom with laughter and good humor.

Jack Kerouac’s archive is vast. Throughout his life he was constantly writing, and he meticulously saved and catalogued his material. The result is that beyond the work published in his lifetime there has been a rich stream of posthumous writing that is far from tapped. This collection of previously unpublished writing culled from the Kerouac archive, and as a companion to Paul Maher Jr.'s Becoming Kerouac, spans Kerouac’s adult life, from a journal written at age seventeen to autobiographical reflections a few years before his death.

In The Kingdom of Surfaces, award-winning poet Sally Wen Mao examines art and history—especially the provenance of objects such as porcelain, silk, and pearls—to frame an important conversation on beauty, empire, commodification, and violence. In lyric poems and wide-ranging sequences, Mao interrogates gendered expressions such as the contemporary “leftover women,” which denotes unmarried women, and the historical “castle-toppler,” a term used to describe a concubine whose beauty ruins an emperor and his empire

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.

"Where does all the grief go when it's not tugging at your wrist?" Enyegue's debut collection is an ode to girlhood, to Blackness, to generational trauma, sexual assault, and mental health. This collection does not aim to heal anyone who listens to it, but instead help them confront their own healing. Rather than sugar-coated bullets that enter you lightly, these poems are designed to hurt.

In Customs, Solmaz Sharif examines what it means to exist in the nowhere of the arrivals terminal, a continual series of checkpoints, officers, searches, and questionings that become a relentless experience of America. With resignation and austerity, these poems trace a pointed indoctrination to the customs of the nation-state and the English language, and the realities they impose upon the imagination, the paces they put us through.