Refractive Africa
Ballet of the Forgotten
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Narrated by:
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Will Alexander
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By:
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Will Alexander
About this listen
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
Winner of the California Book Award in Poetry
Three kinetically distilled long poems by the singular American poet who “transfigures ‘thought’ into a weave of lexical magic” (Philip Lamantia)
“The poet is endemic with life itself,” Will Alexander once said, and in this searing pas de trois, Refractive Africa: Ballet of the Forgotten, he has exemplified this vital candescence with a transpersonal amplification worthy of the Cambrian explosion. “This being the ballet of the forgotten,” he writes as diasporic witness, “of refracted boundary points as venom.” The volume’s opening poem pays homage to the innovative Nigerian-Yoruban author Amos Tutuola; it ends with an encomium to the modernist Malagasy poet Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo—two writers whose luminous art suffered “colonial wrath through refraction”. A tribute to the Congo forms the bridge and brisé vole of the book: the Congo as “charged aural colony” and “primal interconnection”, a “subliminal psychic force” with a colonial and postcolonial history dominated by the Occident. Will Alexander’s improvisatory cosmicity pushes poetic language to the point of most resistance—incantatory and swirling with magical laterality and recovery.
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Between 1925-27, H.P. Lovecraft wrote Supernatural Horror in Literature, an extended essay about about the history of the weird tale. In it he describes supernatural horror from its earliest manifestations up to the 1920s. Lovecraft offers his own candid opinions on the merits (and deficiencies) of the world's canon of strange literature. The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society recorded the essay as an audiobook. Read by society founders Sean Branney and Andrew Leman, the recording is approximately three hours long.
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A Fantastic Multi Dimensional Experience!
- By Sarah on 02-05-19
By: H. P. Lovecraft
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When We Cease to Understand the World
- By: Benjamin Labatut, Adrian West - translator
- Narrated by: Adam Barr
- Length: 5 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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When We Cease to Understand the World is a book about the complicated links between scientific and mathematical discovery, madness, and destruction. Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger - these are some of the luminaries into whose troubled lives Benjamín Labatut thrusts the listener, showing us how they grappled with the most profound questions of existence.
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the true heir w.g. sebald
- By Thomas on 12-23-21
By: Benjamin Labatut, and others
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Spring and All: Facsimile Edition
- New Directions Pearls
- By: William Carlos Williams
- Narrated by: Sean Slater
- Length: 1 hr and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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A beautiful facsimile of the 1923 original edition which is considered "one of the greatest poems of the twentieth century" by The New York Times. Spring and All is a manifesto of the imagination - a hybrid of alternating sections of prose and free verse that coalesce in dramatic, energetic, and beautifully cryptic statements of how language re-creates the world. Spring and All contains some of Williams' best-known poetry.
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Classic!
- By Amazon Customer on 01-25-18
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Cosmos and Psyche
- Intimations of a New World View
- By: Richard Tarnas
- Narrated by: Sean Runnette
- Length: 25 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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From a philosopher whose magisterial history of Western thought was praised by Joseph Campbell and Huston Smith comes a brilliant new book that traces the connection between cosmic cycles and archetypal patterns of human experience. Drawing on years of research and on thinkers from Plato to Jung, Richard Tarnas explores the planetary correlations of epochal events like the French Revolution, the two world wars, and September 11. Cosmos and Psyche is a work of immense sophistication, deep learning, and lasting importance.
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Compelling content; monochromatic narration
- By Melissa Chase on 04-14-21
By: Richard Tarnas
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New Self, New World
- Recovering Our Senses in the Twenty-First Century
- By: Philip Shepherd, Andrew Harvey
- Narrated by: Philip Shepherd
- Length: 22 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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New Self, New World challenges the primary story of what it means to be human, the random and materialistic lifestyle that author Philip Shepherd calls our "shattered reality". This reality encourages us to live in our heads, self-absorbed in our own anxieties. Drawing on diverse sources and inspiration, New Self, New World reveals that our state of head-consciousness falsely teaches us to see the body as something we possess and to try to take care of it without ever really learning how to inhabit it.
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Deep dive into our embodied human experience
- By Marshall White on 01-20-20
By: Philip Shepherd, and others
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My Bright Abyss
- Meditation of a Modern Believer
- By: Christian Wiman
- Narrated by: John Lescault
- Length: 5 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Seven years ago, Christian Wiman, a well-known poet and the editor of Poetry magazine, wrote a now-famous essay about having faith in the face of death. My Bright Abyss, composed in the difficult years since and completed in the wake of a bone marrow transplant, is a moving meditation on what a viable contemporary faith - responsive not only to modern thought and science but also to religious tradition - might look like.
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Meditative Poetry in Prose
- By Marianne Murphy Zarzana on 07-21-19
By: Christian Wiman
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He Held Radical Light
- The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art
- By: Christian Wiman
- Narrated by: John Lescault
- Length: 3 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Christian Wiman explores the relationships between art and faith, death and fame, heaven and oblivion. Above all, He Held Radical Light is a love letter to poetry, filled with moving, surprising, and sometimes funny encounters with the poets Wiman has known.
By: Christian Wiman
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Nature
- By: Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Narrated by: Phil Paonessa
- Length: 51 mins
- Unabridged
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This version of Nature is an 1843 revision to the popular essay written and published in 1836. In the original essay, Emerson put forth the foundation of transcendentalism and suggested that reality can be understood by studying nature. Within the essay, Emerson divides nature into four usages: commodity, beauty, language and discipline. These distinctions define how humans use nature for their basic needs, their desire for delight, their communication with one another, and their understanding of the world.
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Beautiful Classic, rushed reading
- By Chris C. on 01-07-21
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The Meaning of Masonry
- By: W.L. Wilmshurst
- Narrated by: Chris Coxon
- Length: 6 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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This set of essays discusses the esoteric side of Freemasonry. The Spirit of Masonry has been the essential source for anyone exploring the inner mysteries of the Masonic fraternity for more than 200 years.
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Great!
- By Go Seigen on 12-12-23
By: W.L. Wilmshurst
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Dante's Divine Comedy
- A Guide for the Spiritual Journey
- By: Mark Vernon
- Narrated by: Mark Vernon
- Length: 17 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Dante Alighieri was early in recognizing that our age has a problem. His hometown, Florence, was at the epicenter of the move from the medieval world to the modern. The Divine Comedy was born in a time of troubling transition, which is why it still speaks today. In this narrative retelling and guide, from the gates of hell, up the mountain of purgatory, to the empyrean of paradise, Mark Vernon offers a vivid introduction and interpretation of a book that, 700 years on, continues to open minds and change lives.
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An Inversion of Dante
- By A.B.D. on 09-24-22
By: Mark Vernon
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Irrational Man
- A Study in Existential Philosophy
- By: William Barrett
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 13 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Widely recognized as the finest definition of existentialist philosophy ever written, this book introduced existentialism to America in 1958. Irrational Man begins by discussing the roots of existentialism in the art and thinking of Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, Baudelaire, Blake, Dostoevski, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Picasso, Joyce, and Beckett. The heart of the book explains the views of the foremost existentialists - Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre. The result is a marvelously lucid definition of existentialism and a brilliant interpretation of its impact.
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heady
- By A. Antine on 07-28-22
By: William Barrett
What listeners say about Refractive Africa
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Anonymous User
- 06-28-23
Astounding wow wow wow!!!
Alexander is by far one of the most formidable poets of this century! Bless his soul forever and ever!!!
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