Skilled in evocative imagery and inventive syntax, poets are masters at bending and breaking the rules of language for the sake of creating soul-stirring beauty. When they showcase their skills (as well as keen ears for how words echo off the page!) across longer-form mediums, what results are gorgeously expansive novels and memoirs that make the heart of the literary world skip a beat, while gifting us with truly astounding performances.
There is something so hauntingly beautiful about the way a skilled poet can spin a web of complex emotions thanks to a mastery of language that moves the rest of us to tears while expertly driving home a point. Ocean Vuong is that kind of poet, as seen in his critically acclaimed poetry collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds. And his stunning debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, which he also narrates, shows how deftly he can write at that level no matter the genre. This deeply moving listen touches on masculine identity, concepts of family, drug use, and more. —Aaron S.
I was drawn to Martyr! because, in my experience, poets make good novelists (looking at you, Ocean Vuong). And Kaveh Akbar’s poetry certainly shines through in his debut novel. The story teems with inventive language, mixing the humorous and profound in surprising ways, like in an imagined conversation between the protagonist’s dead mother and Lisa Simpson (yes, of The Simpsons). And narrator Arian Moayed, an Emmy- and Tony-nominated actor, is a perfect match for our hero, Cyrus Shams, a recovering addict, aspiring poet, and orphaned son of Iranian immigrants. Cyrus’s obsession with martyrdom becomes a vehicle for trying to shake his demons, find his voice, and make sense of his parents’ deaths. His journey to find the answers is one I won’t soon forget. —Phoebe N.
Dropping dazzling prose and devastating epiphanies, it’s no surprise that Ruth Madievsky is a poet, nor that her glittering, druggy debut—which continues the literary tradition of excavating Los Angeles’s sleazy side while also offering a timely sapphic romance and hopeful recovery arc—will be devoured by fans of Ottessa Moshfegh, Raven Leilani, and, dare I say, Charles Bukowski. Though her protagonist holds everything in, narrator Moniqua Plante is a direct conduit to her brain, which worries over traumas absorbed from her mentally-ill mother and Russian Jewish grandmother, her growing pill addiction, and whatever happened to her toxic fireball of a sister, who’s gone missing. —Kat J.
The first stanza of my favorite Sylvia Plath poem, “Elm,” ends with the line, “I do not fear it: I have been there.” It’s a reflection on the darkest moments that feel inescapable, presented with an oddly comforting reassurance: that pain is not permanent and that there are others who have felt those same flickers of emptiness. In her sole novel, Plath’s gorgeous, visceral prose coupled with personal insights on neurosis and depression crafts a listen that is perhaps the most accurate depiction of daily life with a mood disorder that I have ever heard, while also proving a worthy meditation on womanhood and the exhausting push and pull of expectations and desire. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s contemplative, haunting cadence captures both the hollowness symptomatic of depression and the lilt of hope and light that still manages to crack through. —Alanna M.
MK Asante began writing his heart-wrenching and utterly poetic memoir while his nephew was hospitalized for nine gun shot wounds. Ultimately, this urgent meditation on grief and intergenerational parallels swiftly unspools into a dynamic exploration of opioid addiction, incarceration, and redemption that beats with the relentless and unmistakeable drive of a story rooted in Philadelphian hip-hop culture. Told in four-part harmony and narrated, in turn, by a powerful multicast of performers, Asante’s gorgeous love letter to familial ties illuminates the intricacies of inherited pain like no other. —H.H.
When two-time poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Natasha Trethewey was just a teenager, her mother was murdered by an ex. Decades later, Trethewey branched into memoir to confront that painful past in her gutting and beautiful Memorial Drive. Part true crime investigation of a senseless yet tragically common act of domestic violence, part history of the segregated South’s legacy of trauma, and part exquisite reflection on the ultimate loss, Memorial Drive alternately saddens, provokes, and exhilarates—not least because Trethewey’s narration is as moving and intentional as her lyrical prose. —K.J.
Adapting to grief often feels like a surreal experience, a reality poet Vanessa Angélica Villarreal embraces as she pays homage to the healing influences that fantasy and pop culture escapism have played throughout her life. Magical/Realism grapples with themes of migration, violence, colonial erasure, and, above all, the trauma of remembering, while simultaneously offering a new lens for reimagining one’s narrative by archiving the art that shapes our memories across the years. Not only is this intimate essay collection a healing listen, but it repositions cultural criticism on the map as a meaningful and resonant form of catharsis. —H.H.
Told through the perspective of his nine-year-old self, Javier Zamora’s Solito is a moving account of his perilous, exhausting solo journey from El Salvador to the United States, where his parents awaited him. Zamora was entirely reliant on the support and compassion of his fellow migrants to survive—a story that is both his own and shared by many. Zamora is a poet first, and his delivery is pitch-perfect, lending a lyrical cadence and a well of emotion to an already beautifully crafted memoir. His voice, at times quivering, small, or uncertain, much like his young self, is wielded as an instrument of the story, not an appendix, reminding the listener of the human beings behind the statistics and political platforms. —A.M.
How the Boogeyman Became a Poet is a dynamic personification of the voice of self-doubt that haunted Tony Keith Jr. across his transformation from being a closeted Black teen battling poverty, racism, and homophobia to becoming an openly gay first-generation college student. Flexing his muscles as both a spoken-word poet and hip-hop educator, Keith positions verse writing as a cathartic vector for battling one’s inner demons in real-time with his performance, making the freedom he finds in his craft energetically evident. —H.H.
Put simply, Safiya Sinclair’s stunning memoir demands to be heard. A celebrated poet, Sinclair wields a delicate, evocative writing style rich with lush detail and fluidity, and her narration mirrors that flow exquisitely. In a nearly musical cadence, Sinclair recounts a turbulent upbringing in a patriarchal Rastafari household that denied her independence and self-expression, instead demanding unquestioned obedience. As she comes of age and courageously comes into her own through the outlets of education and art, Sinclair finds herself on the long road to healing, balancing reflection with redemption. The result is nothing short of superb. —A.M.
Compressing the major themes and events from one’s life into a neat and tidy story is no small feat for any skilled memoirist. To accomplish this same task in verse only proves what a master of poetic precision Brontez Purnell truly is. Known as “the bard of the underloved and overlooked,” he is no stranger to deep-diving into the core of one’s character (take, for example, 100 Boyfriends, his revelatory “spiral” into the lives of queer men which won him the 2022 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Fiction). With Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt, Purnell exposes the many mishaps and moments of brutal revelation that shaped his signature unabashed voice as a storyteller today, including a vicious brawl he participated in at a poetry conference (proving that verse writers pack a lot more punch than just fistfuls of flowery language!) —H.H.
Roses are red, violets are blue, and Maggie Nelson dazzles with her philosophical musings on how color reflects the emotional depths that make us most human in this gorgeously poetic listen. From her award-winning memoir, The Argonauts, to her riveting yet personal foray into the true crime genre, The Red Parts, she is a master at bending expectations with her creative nonfiction writing, and Bluets may just be her most soul-stirring work of all time. Piercing yet tender, celebratory yet intimate, and above all else, deeply, deeply blue, this audiobook will change the way you view the world indefinitely. —H.H.
With her first memoir, acclaimed poet Maggie Smith meditates on the dissolution of her marriage and her fierce reclamation of independence. I loved her realization, after finishing Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, that novelizing this work might have been simpler than what she calls a “tell-some”—an honest reckoning of her side of the story. Instead, in luminous vignettes that stay hyper-focused on the specifics of Smith’s own experience, her truth resonates on a universal scale. —K.J.
Food writing is all about indulging the senses, allowing poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil to take a rich and textured look at how flavor evokes such emotions as grief, shame, and desire while undeniably whetting our appetites with her masterfully lush imagery. Peppering her performance with humorous personal insights, she infuses an irresistibly human touch throughout this thought-provoking essay collection. —H.H.
The award-winning author, poet, educator, and producer Kwame Alexander is no stranger to innovation. His “new-fashioned” memoir, Why Father’s Cry at Night, experiments with several forms of writing, mixing in recipes and letters to the original collection of love poems that first formed the foundation for this cathartic exploration of grief, fatherhood, and so much more. Alexander’s narration transforms the listen into a truly moving act of emotional reckoning and release. —Katie O.
According to Clint Smith, “poetry is the act of paying attention,” which is exactly what he was doing as the seed for his New York Times nonfiction bestseller took root. After witnessing several Confederate statues come down in his hometown of New Orleans in 2017, Smith began questioning how this country tells the story of its past. Thus, his scrupulous attention to how words resonate once released into the world serves, in its own right, as an act of defiance against the ways slavery manifests at different historical sites across the country. Aided by his piercing eloquence as a storyteller, How the Word Is Passed swiftly landed a spot as one of Audible's best audiobooks of 2021. —H.H.
A true blend of biography and memoir, Ada Calhoun’s Also a Poet is a fascinating gem of a listen. Calhoun, the author behind nonfiction listens like Why We Can’t Sleep and St. Marks Is Dead, turns her eye toward a subject matter far closer to home. In examining her strained, complicated relationship with her father, the acclaimed art critic Peter Schjeldahl, Calhoun comes across an unexpected connection between them: the late bohemian poet Frank O’Hara. Twisting in its exploration of family, legacy, and art, this listen, featuring exclusive archival audio of artistic giants, is an evocative act of catharsis. —A.M.
American singer-songwriter Patti Smith became an icon of the New York City punk rock movement when she released her 1975 debut album, Horses. And she remains an important figure in music, poetry, and literature to this day. Winner of the 2010 National Book Award for nonfiction, Just Kids is not only a triumph in rock memoir—it’s a triumph in memoir, period. In her own voice, she tells of her scrappy early days in New York City as a budding artist, supported and enthused by her friendship with the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. This listen is just as gorgeously written and performed as you’d expect—a delicate, breathtaking rumination on a generation of lost souls. —A.M.
From her irresistibly electric memoir, Priestdaddy, which dives into some of Catholicism’s darkest secrets while paying tribute to her unconventional upbringing, to her debut novel, No One is Talking About This, Patricia Lockwood always generates the buzz required to convert any fan of her poetry into a devout believer of her sublime skills as a prose writer. With her sharp and subversive humor, her stories give voice to an avalanche of images and references that accumulate to form a landscape that is both post-sense and post-irony, while wholly centered in the truths implicit to our modern day. —H.H.
Joy Harjo is a poet, musician, playwright, and memoirist, as well as the first Native American to hold the honor of being the incumbent United States Poet Laureate. She has long been an outspoken activist when it comes to the United State and Native American affairs, and her powerful memoir Poet Warrior, a lyrical follow-up to Crazy Brave, moves fluidly between prose, song, and poetry to reveal how she came to writing words of compassion and healing to demand justice. —H.H.
With Minor Feelings, poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong demands to ask: “Will there be a future where I, on the page, am simply I, on the page, and not I, proxy for a whole ethnicity, imploring you to believe we are human beings who feel pain?” And just like that, her highly acclaimed essay collection embarks on its relentless and riveting pursuit of posing vital questions concerning everything from family and friendship to art and politics as it relates to Asian American identities. Glimpses of her own self-doubt seep into her narration of this overarching feat of self-awareness, imbuing this seminal work of nonfiction with a hefty dose of radical honesty. —H.H.
You can just feel the lyrical way author Elizabeth Acevedo weaves all the layers and energy of slam poetry into the narration of her highly acclaimed novel-in-verse, The Poet X. Winner of the National Book Award and various other accolades, this rhythmic and relentlessly energetic story centers Xiomara Batista, a high schooler who uses slam poetry as an outlet to vent her feelings about everything from her daily life as a young Afro-Latina woman to a boy who’s caught her eye in class. With her passion for performance, Acevedo has continued to lend her voice to all of the audiobooks she has released since her most seminal work. —H.H.
