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Ordinary Beast
- Poems
- Narrated by: Nicole Sealey
- Length: 43 mins
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Ordinary Beast
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Publisher's summary
ONE OF PUBLISHERS WEEKLY'S TOP 10 POETRY BOOKS OF FALL 2017
NPR'S MOST ANTICIPATED POETRY BOOKS OF 2017
A striking, full-length debut collection from Virgin Islands-born poet Nicole Sealey
The existential magnitude, deep intellect, and playful subversion of St. Thomas-born, Florida-raised poet Nicole Sealey’s work is restless in its empathic, succinct examination and lucid awareness of what it means to be human.
The ranging scope of inquiry undertaken in Ordinary Beast—at times philosophical, emotional, and experiential—is evident in each thrilling twist of image by the poet. In brilliant, often ironic lines that move from meditation to matter of fact in a single beat, Sealey’s voice is always awake to the natural world, to the pain and punishment of existence, to the origins and demises of humanity. Exploring notions of race, sexuality, gender, myth, history, and embodiment with profound understanding, Sealey’s is a poetry that refuses to turn a blind eye or deny. It is a poetry of daunting knowledge.
Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
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- Narrated by: Melissa Febos
- Length: 7 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 115
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 98
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 98
In her critically acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart, Melissa Febos laid bare the intimate world of the professional dominatrix, turning an honest examination of her life into a lyrical study of power, desire, and fulfillment. In her dazzling Abandon Me, Febos captures the intense bonds of love and the need for connection - with family, lovers, and oneself. First, her birth father, who left her with only an inheritance of addiction and Native American blood, its meaning a mystery.
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5 out of 5 stars
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This journey is captivating to say the least!
- By Ilanna on 08-11-17
By: Melissa Febos
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Galilee
- By: Clive Barker
- Narrated by: Paul Hecht
- Length: 23 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 266
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 237
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Story4 out of 5 stars 240
The Barbarossa family’s roots are far more ancient and ethereal, but they are bound to the Gearys by a shared history of murder, insanity, and adultery. When Rachel Geary and Galilee, the seductive prince of the Barbarossa clan, fall in love, they unleash powerful enmities that could destroy both dynasties. Shorter and more conventional than some of Barker’s other work, this novel is especially rich with complex, passionate, three-dimensional characters, lush settings, and elegant language.
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5 out of 5 stars
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An Audiophile's Dream
- By Joseph on 09-01-11
By: Clive Barker
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Good Poems
- Selected and Introduced by Garrison Keillor
- By: Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, and others
- Narrated by: Garrison Keillor
- Length: 4 hrs and 23 mins
- Abridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 197
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 159
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 148
Good Poems includes poems about lovers, children, failure, everyday life, death, and transcendence. It features the work of classic poets, such as Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Robert Frost, as well as the work of contemporary greats such as Howard Nemerov, Charles Bukowski, Donald Hall, Billy Collins, Robert Bly, and Sharon Olds Good Poems includes poems about lovers, children, failure, everyday life, death, and transcendence.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Very good, but. . .
- By KSmith on 01-27-11
By: Emily Dickinson, and others
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Bone
- By: Yrsa Daley-Ward, Kiese Laymon - foreword
- Narrated by: Yrsa Daley-Ward, Kiese Laymon
- Length: 1 hr and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 25
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 24
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 24
From navigating the oft competing worlds of religion and desire, to balancing society’s expectations with the raw experience of being a woman in the world; from detailing the experiences of growing up as a first generation black British woman, to working through situations of dependence and abuse; from finding solace in the echoing caverns of depression and loss, to exploring the vulnerability and redemption in falling in love, each of the raw and immediate poems in Daley-Ward’s bone resonates to the core of what it means to be human.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Visceral,blood hot, thrilling poetry-prose
- By Pam on 12-28-22
By: Yrsa Daley-Ward, and others
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Priestdaddy
- A Memoir
- By: Patricia Lockwood
- Narrated by: Patricia Lockwood
- Length: 10 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 941
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 848
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Story4 out of 5 stars 846
Father Greg Lockwood is unlike any Catholic priest you have ever met - a man who lounges in boxer shorts, who loves action movies, and whose constant jamming on the guitar reverberates "like a whole band dying in a plane crash in 1972". His daughter is an irreverent poet who long ago left the church's country. When an unexpected crisis leads her and her husband to move back into her parents' rectory, their two worlds collide.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Terrible narration--read, don't listen
- By Penelope on 08-06-17
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Speak
- A Novel
- By: Louisa Hall
- Narrated by: Suzan Crowley, Christopher Ashman, Adrienne Rusk, and others
- Length: 8 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 90
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 83
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Story4 out of 5 stars 84
In a narrative that spans geography and time, from the Atlantic Ocean in the 17th century to a correctional institute in Texas in the near future, and told from the perspectives of five very different characters, Speak considers what it means to be human and what it means to be less than fully alive.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Like nothing else
- By Anonymous User on 06-22-17
By: Louisa Hall
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Everything Is Illuminated
- By: Jonathan Safran Foer
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 11 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 98
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 86
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Story4 out of 5 stars 87
With only a yellowing photograph in hand, a young man—also named Jonathan Safran Foer—sets out to find the woman who might or might not have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Accompanied by an old man haunted by memories of the war, an amorous dog named Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior, and the unforgettable Alex, a young Ukrainian translator who speaks in a sublimely butchered English, Jonathan is led on a quixotic journey over a devastated landscape and into an unexpected past.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Astounding reading
- By bookworm123abc on 02-10-23
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Mother Tongue
- By: Demetria Martinez
- Narrated by: Alyssa Bresnahan
- Length: 3 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 24
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 16
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 16
A nameless El Salvadoran man, fleeing torture and imprisonment, arrives in the United States - his only hope for asylum. The American woman who has volunteered to help him is searching for something to add meaning to her life. When these two lonely people meet, their haunting relationship fulfills their hearts' desires, but it also gives life to their darkest dreams.
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The Passion
- By: Jeanette Winterson
- Narrated by: Tania Rodrigues, Daniel Pirrie
- Length: 5 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 80
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 68
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 68
Set during the tumultuous years of the Napoleonic Wars, The Passion intertwines the destinies of two remarkable people: Henri, a simple French soldier, who follows Napoleon from glory to Russian ruin; and Villanelle, the red-haired, web-footed daughter of a Venetian boatman, whose husband has gambled away her heart. In Venice’s compound of carnival, chance, and darkness, the pair meets their singular destiny.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Excellence.
- By Scottie V. on 10-07-19
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Love and Other Ways of Dying
- Essays
- By: Michael Paterniti
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 14 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 76
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 61
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Story4 out of 5 stars 61
In the 17 wide-ranging essays collected for the first time in Love and Other Ways of Dying, he brings his full literary powers to bear, pondering happiness and grief, memory and the redemptive power of human connection. In the remote Ukranian countryside, Paterniti picks apples (and faces mortality) with a real-life giant; in Nanjing, China, he confronts a distraught jumper on a suicide bridge.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Incredibly intimate voice for humanity
- By Ed Hodges on 01-02-16
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There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce
- By: Morgan Parker
- Narrated by: Morgan Parker
- Length: 1 hr and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 125
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 110
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Story4 out of 5 stars 109
The only thing more beautiful than Beyoncé is God, and God is a black woman sipping rosé and drawing a lavender bath, texting her mom, belly laughing in the therapist's office, feeling unloved, being on display, daring to survive. Morgan Parker stands at the intersections of vulnerability and performance, of desire and disgust, of tragedy and excellence. Unrelentingly feminist, tender, and ruthless, these poems are an altar to the complexities of black American womanhood in an age of non-indictments and déjà vu.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Just no.
- By Janice on 07-08-20
By: Morgan Parker
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Middle C
- By: William H. Gass
- Narrated by: Jeremy Arthur
- Length: 16 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 43
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 38
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Story4 out of 5 stars 38
Gass’ new novel moves from World War II Europe to a small town in postwar Ohio. In a series of variations, Gass gives us a mosaic of a life - futile, comic, anarchic - arranged in an array of vocabularies, altered rhythms, forms and tones, and broken pieces with music as both theme and structure, set in the key of middle C. It begins in Graz, Austria, 1938. Joseph Skizzen's father, pretending to be Jewish, leaves his country for England with his wife and two children to avoid any connection with the Nazis, who he foresees will soon take over his homeland....
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4 out of 5 stars
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All the world was a stage. But not for all the wor
- By Darwin8u on 06-07-14
By: William H. Gass