Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Poetry

A poet renowned for her “wit and complexity” (Poetry Foundation) explores the endless evolution and malleability of life on earth in her most curious, inventive collection to date.

A collection as remarkable for the force of its feeling as for the range of its vision, End of Empire explores the tensions of Black and American identity within an ecological framework. Inspired by the language and landscape of the poet’s rural Kentucky hometown and the ways that inherited religious and political narratives shape our relationships with our surroundings and ourselves, these poems reckon with the ways the speaker, their body, and their natural and ideological surroundings continuously remake each other.

Joshua Bennett and Jesse McCarthy repeatedly found themselves struck by the number of exciting poets they came across in long-out-of-print collections and forgotten journals whose work has been neglected or entirely ignored, even by scholars of Black poetry. Minor Notes is an excavation initiative that recovers and curates archival materials from these understudied, though supremely gifted, African American poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and aims to bridge scholarly interest with the growing general audience who reads, writes, and circulates poetry within that tradition.

Vincent Toro’s third collection of poetry is a work of Latinxfuturism that confronts the enigmatic and paradoxical relationship human beings have with technology. The poems are a tapestry of meditations on social media and surveillance culture, satires on science fiction and the space race, interrogations of artificial intelligence, cyborg economics, and biohacking, and tributes to women and queer and BIPOC people who have contributed and are contributing to human survival and progress in a technology obsessed world.

Written after two years of artistic silence, during which the world came to a halt due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Minneapolis became the epicentre of protest following the murder of George Floyd, Bluff is Danez Smith’s powerful reckoning with their role and responsibility as a poet and with their hometown. This is a book of awakening out of violence, guilt, shame and critical pessimism to imagine how we can strive towards a new existence in a world that seems to be dissolving into desolate futures.

In Thick with Trouble, award-winning poet Amber McBride interrogates if being “trouble”—difficult, unruly, fearsome, defiant—is ultimately a weakness or an incomparable source of strength. Steeped in the Hoodoo spiritual tradition and organized via reimagined tarot cards, this collection becomes a chorus of unapologetic women who laugh, cry, mesmerize, and bring outsiders to their knees. Summoning the supernatural to examine death, rebirth, and life outside the male gaze, Amber McBride has crafted a haunting collection of poems that reckon with the force and complexity of Black womanhood.

These piercing, surprising poems look to familial history, rituals of faith, and the natural world to explore how the intersecting cultures of Blackness and queerness relate to each other. As the collection evolves, the listener is challenged and empowered to seek expansiveness in spaces that have not previously been excavated, reckon with the complexities of interpersonal relationships, and explore memory as a catalyst for self-determination.

Elaine Feeney brings her poetry to Harvill Secker and Vintage with this powerful, personal, fierce collection about women's lives, bodies, battles and triumphs. From a searing meditation on the experience and aftershocks of a sexual assault - written as a series of unflinching cantos - to poems of love, place and new beginnings, Feeney's voice is strong and clear, challenging and confessional, rooted in her west coast of Ireland heritage while speaking to and with women everywhere.