Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Poetry

Zeina Hashem Beck writes at the intersection of the divine and the profane, where she crafts elegant, candid poems that simultaneously exude a boundless curiosity and a deep knowingness. Formally electrifying—from lyrics and triptychs to ghazals and Zeina's own duets, in which English and Arabic echo and contradict each other—O explores the limits of language, notions of home and exile, and stirring visions of motherhood, memory, and faith.

An arresting debut collection about identity, ancestry and history, from a young poet selected as an inaugural winner of the #Merky Books New Writers' Prize, dedicated to discovering the best writers of a new generation. Written with profound depth and insight, the poems in Teeth in the Back of My Neck explore the joys, the confusions and the moments of sadness behind having one's history scattered around the globe ­- and the way in which your identity is always worn on your skin, whether you like it or not.

The work of Carl Dennis has won praise for its “integrity, its substance, and its seemingly effortless craft; and for its embodiment of passionate inquiry” (Times Literary Supplement). The title of his new collection, Earthborn, helps to point the way to its two central concerns: how to find meaning, as creatures of the earth, in lives that are short and frail and destined to be forgotten; and how, as stewards of the earth, to address the need to protect our home from ourselves, from the menace to life posed by our own species.

The Vita nuova is elaborately and symbolically patterned, consisting of a selection of Dante's early poems interspersed with his own prose commentary. The poems themselves tell the story of his love for Beatrice, from their first meeting at a May Day party in her father's house, through Dante's sufferings and his attempts to conceal the true object of his devotion by the use of "screen-loves", to his overwhelming grief at her death, ending with the transformative vision of her in heaven.

Borderline Fortune is a meditation on intangible family inheritance - of unresolved intergenerational conflicts and traumas in particular - set against the backdrop of our planetary inheritance as humans. As species go extinct and glaciers melt, Teresa K. Miller asks what we owe one another and what it means to echo one’s ancestors’ grief and fear. Drawing on her family history, Miller seeks to awaken from the intergenerational trance and bear witness to our current moment with clarity and attention.

Warrior-prince Rama is about to be crowned Young King, when he hears the devastating news that his father, king of Ayodhya, has been tricked into banishing him to the forest. His devoted wife, Sita, insists on accompanying him in exile, but the evil 10-headed Lord Ravana has fallen deeply in love with the beautiful princess and steals her away. Aided by Hanuman, mighty captain of the monkeys, Rama sets out across the world to find her and destroy Ravana in a deadly battle.

Johnson transformed memories of the sermons he heard in the late 1800s by renowned African American preachers into this now-classic work of original poetry. Basis for a PBS documentary on Johnson titled Lift Every Voice and Sing.

When Jack Sued Jill is the latest collection of original verse by maverick multimillionaire publisher Felix Dennis. Taking the innocence of nursery rhymes and turning them into something altogether darker, Dennis turns his piercing eye on the follies and absurdities of modern life. From ASBOs to Osama Bin Laden, creationism to crack houses, Humpty Dumpty to Tony Blair, nothing and no one is spared.

Now, with the publication of Homeless in My Heart, Felix Dennis' extraordinary talents have come to fruition - from ironic tales of darkness and savagery to hymns of praise for the glories of nature. Homeless in My Heart fulfils the promise predicted by the author and critic Tom Wolfe, who has called Dennis 'a 21st-century Kipling [whose poetry] rollicks and rolls with rhyme, meter, and melody'.

Never one to shy away from difficult subjects, in Love, of a Kind Dennis brings awkwardness, pain and intimacy together in an inimitable and pithy way. In over 50 new poems, accompanied by woodcut engravings, not only does Dennis present us with a different kind of love, but he also presents us with a different way of talking about love.

Home is where you start from, but where is a swallow's real home? And what does native mean if the English oak is an immigrant from Spain? In a selection of richly varied poems and illuminating prose interludes from her collection The Mara Crossing, Ruth Padel weaves science, myth, wild nature, and human history to conjure a world created and sustained by migration. 'We're all from somewhere else,' she begins, tracing the millennia-old journeys of cells, trees, birds, and beasts.

Deep in limestone country, at the corner of Wiltshire, Oxfordshire, and Gloucestershire, lies the village of Coleshill. This haunting new collection from Fiona Sampson is a portrait of place, both real and imaginary; a dreamscape with its roots deep in the local soil. The poems hum with an evocative music of their own: there are hymns of the orchards, verses for walkers, songs for bees. These are slices of life and states of mind; poems of grief, fears, and maledictions, but also of renewal, resurrections, and the promise of spring.

The poems in Adrian Matejka's newest and fifth collection, Somebody Else Sold the World, meditate on the ways we exist in an uncontrollable world: in love and its aftermaths, in families that divide themselves, in protest-filled streets, in isolation as routines become obsolete because of lockdown orders and curfews. Somebody Else uses past and future touchstones like pop songs, love notes, and imaginary gossip to illuminate those moments of splendor that persist even in exhaustion.

Tyler Knott Gregson is the original InstaPoet. With loyal fans across the country and all over the internet, he breathes new life into this ancient medium and delights fans with his openness and honesty. This new book will be his first poetry collection in four years, and he returns now with a message of hope. In his elegant and simple style, Gregson will lift your spirits, keep you going when times get tough, and remind you of the inherent inner strength you already have within you.

The first selection of poems by renowned Iranian poet Garous Abdolmalekian to appear in English, this collection is a captivating, disorienting descent into the trauma of loss and its aftermath. In spare lines, Abdolmalekian conjures surreal, cinematic images that pan wide as deftly as they narrow into intimate focus. Time is a thread come unspooled: Pain arrives before the wound, and the dead wait for sunrise.

With the same brilliant wit and biting realism that made Love Poems for Married People, Love Poems for People with Children, and Love Poems for Anxious People such hits, John Kenney is back with a brand new collection that tackles the hilarity of life in the office. From waiting in line for the printer and revising spreadsheet after spreadsheet, to lukewarm coffee, office politics, and the daily patterns of your most annoying - and lovable - coworkers, Kenney masterfully captures the warmth and humor of working the "9 to 5" in today's modern era.

In a new collection that is "a force of nature" (Amy Gerstler), renowned Native poet Heid E. Erdrich applies her rich inventive voice and fierce wit to the deforming effects of harassment and oppression.

With the same brilliant wit and hilarious realism that made Love Poems for Married People such a hit, John Kenney is back with a brand new collection of poems, this time taking on the greatest "joy" in life: children. Kenney covers it all, from newborns, toddlers, and sleep deprivation, to the terrible twos, terrible tweens, and terrible teens. A parent's love is unconditional, but sometimes that button can't help but be pushed.

In Poor, Caleb Femi explores the trials, tribulations, dreams and joys of young Black boys in 21st-century Peckham. He contemplates the ways in which they are informed by the built environment of concrete walls and gentrifying neighbourhoods that form their stage, writes a coded, near-mythical history of the personalities and sagas of his South London youth and pays tribute to the rappers and artists who spoke to their lives.

In The New Carthaginians, time – and with it the world – is out of joint. A hijacked plane lands at Entebbe International Airport in 1976, triggering the crisis that will lead to Idi Amin’s Uganda becoming a pariah state and, within a few years, to the young Nick Makoha’s flight from the country. A mysterious writer daubs poetic slogans on the walls of late-’70s New York City, signing them SAMO©. Concerned throughout with flight and falling, the sample and the loop, The New Carthaginians is a poetry collection of staggering originality.