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The Poetry of Strangers
- What I Learned Traveling America with a Typewriter
- Narrated by: Graham Halstead
- Length: 7 hrs and 28 mins
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Publisher's summary
It might surprise you who’s a fan of poetry - when it meets them where they are.
Before he became an award-winning writer and poet, Brian Sonia-Wallace set up a typewriter on the street with a sign that said “Poetry Store” and discovered something surprising: All over America, people want poems. An amateur busker at first, Brian asked countless strangers, “What do you need a poem about?”
To his surprise, passersby opened up to share their deepest yearnings, loves, and heartbreaks. Hundreds of them. Then thousands. Around the nation, Brian’s poetry crusade drew countless converts from all walks of life.
In The Poetry of Strangers, Brian tells the story of his cross-country journey in a series of heartfelt and insightful essays. From Minnesota to Tennessee, California to North Dakota, Brian discovered that people aren’t so afraid of poetry when it’s telling their stories. In “dying” towns flourish vibrant artistic spirits and fascinating American characters who often pass under the radar, from the Mall of America’s mall walkers to retirees on Amtrak to self-proclaimed witches in Salem.
In a time of unprecedented loneliness and isolation, Brian’s journey shows how art can be a vital bridge to community in surprising places. Conventional wisdom says Americans don’t want to talk to each other, but according to this poet-for-hire, everyone is just dying to be heard.
Thought-provoking, moving, and eye-opening, The Poetry of Strangers is an unforgettable portrait of America told through the hidden longings of one person at a time, by one of our most important voices today. The fault lines and conflicts that divide us fall away when we remember to look, in every stranger, for poetry.
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Story
It's a report tempered by hard times. In "Matricide", Daum unflinchingly describes a parent's death and the uncomfortable emotions it provokes; and in "Diary of a Coma" she relates her own journey to the twilight of the mind. But Daum also operates in a comic register. With perfect precision, she reveals the absurdities of the marriage-industrial complex, of the New Age dating market, and of the peculiar habits of the young and digital.
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Complaining about her dead mom.
- By Erik Hermansen on 11-23-14
By: Meghan Daum
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Home Baked
- My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco
- By: Alia Volz
- Narrated by: Alia Volz
- Length: 14 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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During the '70s in San Francisco, Alia's mother ran the underground Sticky Fingers Brownies, delivering upwards of 10,000 illegal marijuana edibles per month throughout the circus-like atmosphere of a city in the throes of major change. She exchanged psychic readings with Alia's future father, and thereafter had a partner in business and life. Exhilarating, laugh-out-loud funny, and heartbreaking, Home Baked celebrates an eccentric and remarkable extended family, taking us through love, loss, and finding home.
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Everything and more
- By Becky Love on 10-20-24
By: Alia Volz
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The Undocumented Americans
- By: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
- Narrated by: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
- Length: 4 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Writer Karla Cornejo Villavicencio was on DACA when she decided to write about being undocumented for the first time using her own name. It was right after the election of 2016, the day she realized the story she'd tried to steer clear of was the only one she wanted to tell. So she wrote her immigration lawyer's phone number on her hand in Sharpie and embarked on a trip across the country to tell the stories of her fellow undocumented immigrants—and to find the hidden key to her own.
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Raw, heartbreaking - we can do better by others
- By RapaciousReader on 04-11-20
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Hear's the Thing
- Lessons on Listening, Life, and Love
- By: Cody Alan
- Narrated by: Cody Alan, Keith Urban
- Length: 6 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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For Cody Alan, one of country music’s most famous on-air radio and TV personalities, listening to other people has always been a crucial part of his role. It was by fostering his ability to hear others that he discovered the person he most needed to listen to was himself. Listening ultimately led him on a journey of self-discovery where he found the courage to come out as gay, the openness to question spiritually, and the strength to explore a new definition of parenting and family.
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An Honest Conversation
- By Anonymous User on 12-22-21
By: Cody Alan
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The Partly Cloudy Patriot
- By: Sarah Vowell
- Narrated by: Sarah Vowell, Conan O'Brien, Seth Green, and others
- Length: 5 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Sarah Vowell travels through the American past and investigates the dusty, bumpy roads of her own life. Her essays confront a wide range of subjects, icons, and historical moments: Ike, Teddy Roosevelt, and Bill Clinton; Canadian Mounties and German Filmmakers; Tom Cruise and Buffy the Vampire Slayer; twins and nerds; the Gettysburg Address, the State of the Union, and George W. Bush's inauguration. The result is an engrossing audiobook, capturing Vowell's memorable wit and her keen social commentary.
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One of the best surprises on AUDIBLE.COM!!
- By Doggy Bird on 04-14-04
By: Sarah Vowell
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Shortest Way Home
- One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future
- By: Pete Buttigieg
- Narrated by: Pete Buttigieg
- Length: 9 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Once described by The Washington Post as "the most interesting mayor you've never heard of", Pete Buttigieg, the 36-year-old Democratic mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has improbably emerged as one of the nation's most visionary politicians. First elected in 2011, Buttigieg left a successful business career to move back to his hometown, previously tagged by Newsweek as a "dying city", and transformed it into a shining model of urban reinvention.
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Reveals a Person Wise & Experienced & Literate
- By dbbks3 on 03-17-19
By: Pete Buttigieg
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Street of Eternal Happiness
- Big City Dreams Along a Shanghai Road
- By: Rob Schmitz
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 12 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Modern Shanghai: a global city in the midst of a renaissance, where dreamers arrive each day to partake in a mad torrent of capital, ideas, and opportunity. Marketplace's Rob Schmitz is one of them. He immerses himself in his neighborhood, forging deep relationships with ordinary people who see in the city's sleek skyline a brighter future, and a chance to rewrite their destinies.
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Deserving of better audio
- By Rachael on 02-19-18
By: Rob Schmitz
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Sign My Name to Freedom
- A Memoir of a Pioneering Life
- By: Betty Reid-Soskin
- Narrated by: Betty Reid-Soskin
- Length: 8 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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In Betty Reid Soskin’s 96 years of living, she has been a witness to a grand sweep of American history. When she was born in 1921, the lynching of African-Americans was a national epidemic, blackface minstrel shows were the most popular American form of entertainment, white women had only just won the right to vote, and most African-Americans in the Deep South could not vote at all. From her great-grandmother, who had been enslaved until her mid-20s, Betty heard stories of slavery and the times of terror and struggle for Black folk that followed.
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How she stressed Creole, but I guess it was a badge if honor not being regular black.
- By Satisfied customer on 05-21-24
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As I Knew Him
- My Dad, Rod Serling
- By: Anne Serling
- Narrated by: Anne Serling
- Length: 8 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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To Anne Serling, the imposing figure the public saw hosting The Twilight Zone each week, intoning cautionary observations about fate, chance, and humanity, was not the father she knew. Her fun-loving dad would play on the floor with the dogs, had nicknames for everyone in the family, and was apt to put a lampshade on his head and break out in song. He was her best friend, her playmate, and her confidant. After his unexpected death at 50, Anne, just 20, was left stunned.
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A Beautiful Tribute to a Wonderful Man
- By Becky on 04-12-20
By: Anne Serling
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The Song and the Silence
- A Story About Family, Race, and What Was Revealed in a Small Town in the Mississippi Delta While Searching for Booker Wright
- By: Yvette Johnson
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 9 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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"Have to keep that smile", said Booker Wright in the 1966 NBC documentary Mississippi: A Self-Portrait. At the time Wright was a waiter in a Whites-only restaurant and a local business owner who would become an unwitting icon of the civil rights movement. For he did the unthinkable: Before a national audience, he described what life was truly like for the Black people of Greenwood, Mississippi.
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Exceeded every expectation
- By ZeeJ84 on 05-23-21
By: Yvette Johnson
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This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage
- By: Ann Patchett
- Narrated by: Ann Patchett
- Length: 11 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Blending literature and memoir, Ann Patchett, author of State of Wonder and Bel Canto examines her deepest commitments: to writing, family, friends, dogs, books, and her husband in This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage. Together, these essays, previously published in The Atlantic, Harper, Vogue, and The Washington Post, form a resonant portrait of a life lived with loyalty and with love.
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Entertaining, engrossing, and elucidative essays
- By Bonny on 01-07-14
By: Ann Patchett
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1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows
- A Memoir
- By: Ai Weiwei, Allan H. Barr - translator
- Narrated by: David Shih
- Length: 13 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Once a close associate of Mao Zedong and the nation’s most celebrated poet, Ai Weiwei’s father, Ai Qing, was branded a rightist during the Cultural Revolution, and he and his family were banished to a desolate place known as “Little Siberia,” where Ai Qing was sentenced to hard labor cleaning public toilets. Ai Weiwei recounts his childhood in exile, and his difficult decision to leave his family to study art in America, where he befriended Allen Ginsberg and was inspired by Andy Warhol and the artworks of Marcel Duchamp.
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This book changed my life
- By Johnny Nopolis on 08-16-22
By: Ai Weiwei, and others
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My Father's Paradise
- A Son's Search For His Family's Past
- By: Ariel Sabar
- Narrated by: Fajer Al-Kaisi
- Length: 12 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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In a remote corner of the world, forgotten for nearly 3,000 years, lived an enclave of Kurdish Jews so isolated that they still spoke Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Mostly illiterate, they were self-made mystics and gifted storytellers and humble peddlers who dwelt in harmony with their Muslim and Christian neighbors in the mountains of northern Iraq. To these descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, Yona Sabar was born.
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Great story, poorly narrated
- By Oren Kessler on 09-10-24
By: Ariel Sabar
What listeners say about The Poetry of Strangers
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Lloyd Richardson
- 07-01-20
A must listen to for poetry lovers.
This re ignited my love of poetry and inspired me to start my own. Absolutely love the story.
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- Raymond Bing
- 10-23-20
One of the best collections of human experience.
This is a book for the ages. A great example of TODAY for all human kind. Adventure, life, places, people and things all experienced from someone who has been there--done that--and written it down in poetry. All expressed through the tick-tack of the typewriter and all that machine means to our race. I loved this book and it's delivery from the narrator.
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