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American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
- Narrated by: Terrance Hayes
- Length: 1 hr and 18 mins
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American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
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Publisher's summary
A powerful, timely, dazzling collection of sonnets from one of America's most acclaimed poets, Terrance Hayes, the National Book Award-winning author of Lighthead.
In 70 poems bearing the same title, Terrance Hayes explores the meanings of American, of assassin, and of love in the sonnet form. Written during the first two hundred days of the Trump presidency, these poems are haunted by the country's past and future eras and errors, its dreams and nightmares. Inventive, compassionate, hilarious, melancholy, and bewildered - the wonders of this new collection are irreducible and stunning.
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What listeners say about American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- olivia glass
- 08-06-20
Genius ! Genuine!
WOW! Everything about this work is phenomenal! Beyond boundaries and limitation of words! Thank you!
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Abby
- 03-13-23
Error
The collection itself is fantastic. However the audiobook contains an error—Sonnet 9 is missing and what is in the audiobook as Sonnet 9 is just Sonnet 7 again.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Tom
- 11-20-20
Stream of Black Consciousness
A tour of the inside of a Angry Black Man’s Mind and Heart that must be heard over and over again to digest the meaning of every well-chosen word and phrase.
It deserves Five Stars. I gave the Story Component only Four due to my inability to grasp some of the Sonnets, though the language was so great that I went back again and again. Take a chance on this Poet and read his other works.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Brilliant and moving
- By Anthony Boynton on 12-23-20
By: Jericho Brown
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Seamus Heaney I Collected Poems (published 1966-1975)
- Death of a Naturalist; Door into the Dark; Wintering Out; North
- By: Seamus Heaney
- Narrated by: Seamus Heaney
- Length: 3 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 36
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 30
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Story5 out of 5 stars 29
Volume one of the definitive collection of Seamus Heaney reading his own work, recorded in 2009 by RTE. Volume one contains four collections published between 1966 and 1975: Death of a Naturalist, Door into the Dark, Wintering Out and North.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Like nothing I've ever heard before oh, this is ar
- By DCinNM on 08-23-20
By: Seamus Heaney
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Felon
- Poems
- By: Reginald Dwayne Betts
- Narrated by: Reginald Dwayne Betts
- Length: 1 hr and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 61
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 55
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Story5 out of 5 stars 54
Felon tells the story of one man in fierce, dazzling poems - canvassing his wide range of emotions and experiences through homelessness, underemployment, love, drug abuse, domestic violence, fatherhood, and grace - and, in doing so, creates a travelogue for an imagined life. Reginald Dwayne Betts confronts the funk of post-incarceration existence and examines prison not as a static space, but as a force that enacts pressure throughout a person’s life. Challenging the complexities of language, Betts animates what it means to be a “felon”.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Resonates
- By Angel Sanchez on 11-04-19
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The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On
- By: Franny Choi
- Narrated by: Franny Choi
- Length: 1 hr and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 6
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 5
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Story5 out of 5 stars 5
From acclaimed and beloved poet Franny Choi comes a poetry collection for the ends of worlds—past, present, and future. Choi’s third book features poems about historical and impending apocalypses, alongside musings on our responsibilities to each other and visions for our collective survival.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Franny is a gem
- By Anonymous User on 01-24-23
By: Franny Choi
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New American Best Friend
- By: Olivia Gatwood
- Narrated by: Olivia Gatwood
- Length: 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 16
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 13
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Story5 out of 5 stars 12
One of the most recognizable young poets in America, Olivia Gatwood dazzles with her tribute to contemporary American womanhood in her debut book, New American Best Friend. Gatwood's poems deftly deconstruct traditional stereotypes. The focus shifts from childhood to adulthood, gender to sexuality, violence to joy. And always and inexorably, the book moves toward celebration, culminating in a series of odes: odes to the body, to tough women, to embracing your own journey in all its failures and triumphs.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Amazing poetry, but the music
- By Keaira on 07-29-19
By: Olivia Gatwood
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Call Us What We Carry
- Poems
- By: Amanda Gorman
- Narrated by: Amanda Gorman
- Length: 3 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 327
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 277
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 274
Formerly titled The Hill We Climb and Other Poems, the luminous poetry collection by number one New York Times best-selling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman captures a shipwrecked moment in time and transforms it into a lyric of hope and healing. In Call Us What We Carry, Gorman explores history, language, identity, and erasure through an imaginative and intimate collage.
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5 out of 5 stars
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STUNNING!
- By Ciara Jones on 01-02-22
By: Amanda Gorman
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Watch Your Language
- Visual and Literary Reflections on a Century of American Poetry
- By: Terrance Hayes
- Narrated by: Terrance Hayes
- Length: 5 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall0 out of 5 stars 0
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Performance0 out of 5 stars 0
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Story0 out of 5 stars 0
Canonized, overlooked, and forgotten African American poets star in Terrance Hayes's brilliant contemplations of personal, canonical, and allegorical literary development. Proceeding from Toni Morrison's aim to expand the landscape of literary imagination in Playing in the Dark ("I want to draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography"), Watch Your Language charts a lyrical geography of reading and influence in poetry.
By: Terrance Hayes
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Selected Works of Audre Lorde
- By: Audre Lorde, Roxane Gay - editor
- Narrated by: Mia Ellis
- Length: 8 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 11
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 10
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Story5 out of 5 stars 10
Self-described "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet" Audre Lorde is an unforgettable voice in 20th-century literature, and one of the first to center the experiences of black, queer women. This essential collection showcases her indelible contributions to intersectional feminism, queer theory, and critical race studies in 12 landmark essays and more than 60 poems-selected and introduced by one of our most powerful contemporary voices on race and gender, Roxane Gay.
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5 out of 5 stars
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So amazing to have these essays in one place
- By Jessalyn Maguire on 11-04-23
By: Audre Lorde, and others
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Black Girl, Call Home
- By: Jasmine Mans
- Narrated by: Jasmine Mans
- Length: 1 hr and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 248
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 209
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Story5 out of 5 stars 211
From spoken word poet Jasmine Mans comes an unforgettable poetry collection about race, feminism, and queer identity. With echoes of Gwendolyn Brooks and Sonia Sanchez, Mans writes to call herself - and us - home. Each poem explores what it means to be a daughter of Newark, and America - and the painful, joyous path to adulthood as a young, queer Black woman. Black Girl, Call Home is a love letter to the wandering Black girl and a vital companion to any woman on a journey to find truth, belonging, and healing.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Brilliant Delicious
- By erica on 04-22-21
By: Jasmine Mans
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Above Ground
- By: Clint Smith
- Narrated by: Clint Smith
- Length: 1 hr and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 17
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 14
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Story5 out of 5 stars 14
Clint Smith’s vibrant and compelling new collection traverses the vast emotional terrain of fatherhood, and explores how becoming a parent has recalibrated his sense of the world. There are poems that interrogate the ways our lives are shaped by both personal lineages and historical institutions. There are poems that revel in the wonder of discovering the world anew through the eyes of your children, as they discover it for the first time. There are poems that meditate on what it means to raise a family in a world filled with constant social and political tumult.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Love The Intricate Balance…
- By Genna on 10-06-23
By: Clint Smith
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Days Without End
- A Novel
- By: Sebastian Barry
- Narrated by: Aidan Kelly
- Length: 7 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 2,211
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 2,008
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Story4 out of 5 stars 2,003
Thomas McNulty, having fled the Great Famine in Ireland and now barely 17 years old, signs up for the US Army in the 1850s and with his brother in arms, John Cole, goes to fight in the Indian Wars - against the Sioux and the Yurok - and, ultimately, in the Civil War. Orphans of terrible hardships themselves, they find these days to be vivid and alive, despite the horrors they see and are complicit in. Moving from the plains of Wyoming to Tennessee, Sebastian Barry's latest work is a masterpiece of atmosphere and language.
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3 out of 5 stars
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This is about love of two men
- By KEITH on 08-26-17
By: Sebastian Barry
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At Night All Blood Is Black
- A Novel
- By: David Diop, Anna Moschovakis - translator
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 2 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 291
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 247
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 244
Alfa Ndiaye is a Senegalese man who, never before having left his village, finds himself fighting as a so-called “Chocolat” soldier with the French army during World War I. When his friend Mademba Diop, in the same regiment, is seriously injured in battle, Diop begs Alfa to kill him and spare him the pain of a long and agonizing death in No Man’s Land. Unable to commit this mercy killing, madness creeps into Alfa’s mind as he comes to see this refusal as a cruel moment of cowardice.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Compelling story, poor narration
- By Shauna on 07-10-21
By: David Diop, and others
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Rain of Gold
- By: Victor Villaseñor
- Narrated by: Johnny Rey Diaz
- Length: 30 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 404
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 361
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Story5 out of 5 stars 362
Rain of Gold is a true-life saga of love, family and destiny that pulses with bold vitality, sweeping from the war-ravaged Mexican mountains of Pancho Villa's revolution to the days of Prohibition in California.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Thank you Victor again!
- By cynthia g on 09-24-20
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Anna in the Tropics
- By: Nilo Cruz
- Narrated by: full cast
- Length: 1 hr and 49 mins
- Original Recording
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 72
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 55
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Story4 out of 5 stars 55
This poignant and poetic 2003 Pulitzer Prize-winning play captures 1929 Florida at a time when cigars are still rolled by hand and "lectors" are employed to educate and entertain the workers. The arrival of a new lector is a cause for celebration. But when he reads aloud from Anna Karenina, he unwittingly becomes a catalyst in the lives of his avid listeners, for whom Tolstoy, the tropics, and The American Dream prove a volatile combination.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Amazing performances
- By Kristie on 12-17-08
By: Nilo Cruz
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Dreams in a Time of War
- A Childhood Memoir
- By: Ngugi wa'Thiong'o
- Narrated by: Hakeem Kae-Kazim
- Length: 7 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 77
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 74
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 72
Of Kenya's largest ethnic group, the Kikuyu, Ngugi wa Thiongo was born in 1938 in the backlands of his country (Kiambu district) to a father whose four wives bore him two dozen or so children. Ngugi was the fifth child of the third wife. His father was a peasant farmer forced to become a squatter after the British Imperial Act of 1915. Before going off to school, he had what was then considered a bizarre and inexplicable thirst for learning....
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4 out of 5 stars
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An escape through education
- By Tango on 06-17-12
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A Little Devil in America
- Notes in Praise of Black Performance
- By: Hanif Abdurraqib
- Narrated by: JD Jackson
- Length: 9 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 217
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 187
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Story5 out of 5 stars 186
“I was a devil in other countries, and I was a little devil in America, too.” Inspired by these few words, spoken by Josephine Baker at the 1963 March on Washington, MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellow and best-selling author Hanif Abdurraqib has written a profound and lasting reflection on how Black performance is inextricably woven into the fabric of American culture. Filled with sharp insight, humor, and heart, A Little Devil in America exalts the Black performance that unfolds in specific moments in time and space
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5 out of 5 stars
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Magical
- By Mary A. Ardoin on 05-11-21
By: Hanif Abdurraqib