Author: Frank Bidart
Narrator: Frank Bidart
Abridged: 2 hr 35 min
Format: Digital Audiobook
Publisher: Macmillan Audio
Published: 09/10/2019
Genre: Poetry - American
WINNER OF THE 2018 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY
WINNER OF THE 2017 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY
The collected works of one of contemporary poetry’s most original voices
Gathered together, the poems of Frank Bidart perform one of the most remarkable transmutations of the body into language in contemporary literature. His pages represent the human voice in all its extreme registers, whether it’s that of the child-murderer Herbert White, the obsessive anorexic Ellen West, the tormented genius Vaslav Nijinsky, or the poet’s own. And in that embodiment is a transgressive empathy, one that recognizes our wild appetites, the monsters, the misfits, the misunderstood among us and inside us. Few writers have so willingly ventured to the dark places of the human psyche and allowed themselves to be stripped bare on the page with such candor and vulnerability. Over the past half century, Bidart has done nothing less than invent a poetics commensurate with the chaos and appetites of our experience.
Half-light encompasses all of Bidart’s previous books, and also includes a new collection, Thirst, in which the poet austerely surveys his life, laying it plain for us before venturing into something new and unknown. Here Bidart finds himself a “Creature coterminous with thirst,” still longing, still searching in himself, one of the “queers of the universe.”
Visionary and revelatory, intimate and unguarded, Bidart’s Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2017 are a radical confrontation with human nature, a conflict eternally renewed and reframed, restless line by restless line.
Langston Hughes is a widely celebrated African American writer and important leader of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance. Deeply inspired by the great poet Walt Whitman, Hughes’ own writings gave voice to the Black community in the American literar...
Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was the first published book of poetry by an African-American woman. Phillis Wheatley was a servant to a family in Massachusetts, and initially promoted her poetry in Boston newspapers to find a publish...
Winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry Finalist for the 2019 National Book Award Jericho Brown's daring book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown's poetic con...
THE HIGHLY ANTICIPATED SPOKEN WORD POETRY COLLECTION FROM LANA DEL REY, VIOLET BENT BACKWARDS OVER THE GRASS“Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass is the title poem of the book and the first poem I wrote of many. Some of which came to me in the...
Born in Massachusetts in 1830, Emily Dickinson composed over 1770 poems; but apart from her closest friends, no-one knew she was writing at all. Only after her death was her astonishing output discovered and published. A reclusive figure for much of...
The breakout poetry collection by #1 New York Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda GormanFormerly titled The Hill We Climb and Other Poems, the luminous poetry collection by #1 New York Times bestsellin...
The highly anticipated collection of poems from the award-winning writer Ocean VuongHow else do we return to ourselves but to fold The page so it points to the good part In this deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches f...
This program is read by the authorThe debut collection of poetry from Lili Reinhart, the actress and outspoken advocate for mental health awareness and body positivity.I seem to be your new favorite novel.One that keeps you up at night,turning my pa...
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 a...