
Upstream
Selected Essays
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Narrated by:
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Hala Alyan
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Joy Sullivan
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Kate Baer
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By:
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Mary Oliver
About this listen
The New York Times bestselling collection of essays from beloved poet Mary Oliver, also named one of O, The Oprah Magazine’s Ten Best Books of the Year, now in audio.
“I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.”
So begins Upstream, a collection of essays in which revered poet Mary Oliver reflects on her willingness to lose herself within the beauty and mysteries of the natural world and the world of literature. Emphasizing the significance of her childhood “friend” Walt Whitman, who inspired her to vanish into the world of her own writing, Oliver meditates on the forces that allowed her to create a life for herself out of work and love.
Upstream follows Oliver as she contemplates the pleasure of artistic labor, her boundless curiosity for the flora and fauna that surround her, and the responsibility she has inherited from Shelley, Wordsworth, Emerson, Poe, and Frost, the great thinkers and writers of the past, to live thoughtfully, intelligently, and to observe with passion. Throughout this collection, Oliver positions not just herself upstream but us as well—as she encourages us all to keep moving, to lose ourselves in the awe of the unknown, and to give power and time to the creative and whimsical urges that live within us.
Narrated by poets Hala Alyan, Joy Sullivan, and Kate Baer
©2016 Mary Oliver (P)2023 NW Orchard, LLC, with permission of Bill Reichblum for Mary Oliver. Audio recordings: Pushkin IndustriesListeners also enjoyed...
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Heartbreak Like a Thousand Cuts
- By Susie Bright on 04-18-18
By: Qiu Miaojin, and others
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Poetry Unbound
- 50 Poems to Open Your World
- By: Pádraig Ó Tuama
- Narrated by: Pádraig Ó Tuama
- Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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In the tumult of our contemporary moment, poetry has emerged as an inviting, consoling outlet with a unique power to move and connect us, to inspire fury, tears, joy, laughter, and surprise. This generous anthology pairs fifty illuminating poems with poet and podcast host Pádraig Ó Tuama's appealing, unhurried reflections. With keen insight and warm personal anecdotes, Ó Tuama considers each poem's artistry and explores how its meaning can reach into our own lives.
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Praise to Pádraig O Tuama
- By Marilyn Hargrove on 02-01-23
By: Pádraig Ó Tuama
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The Years
- By: Annie Ernaux
- Narrated by: Anna Bentinck
- Length: 8 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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The Years is a personal narrative of the period of 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present - even projections into the future - photos, books, songs, radio, television, and decades of advertising and headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and written notes from six decades of diaries. Local dialect, words of the time, slogans, brands, and names for ever-proliferating objects are given a voice here. The voice we recognize as the author's continually dissolves and re-emerges.
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Mixed Feelings
- By Elin VanD on 05-10-20
By: Annie Ernaux
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Soil
- The Story of a Black Mother's Garden
- By: Camille T. Dungy
- Narrated by: Camille T. Dungy
- Length: 10 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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In Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden poet and scholar Camille T. Dungy recounts the seven-year odyssey to diversify her garden in the predominantly white community of Fort Collins, Colorado. When she moved there in 2013, with her husband and daughter, the community held strict restrictions about what residents could and could not plant in their gardens.
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Like medicine...
- By Broderek on 06-17-23
By: Camille T. Dungy
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The Comfort of Crows
- A Backyard Year
- By: Margaret Renkl
- Narrated by: Margaret Renkl
- Length: 7 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Comfort of Crows, Margaret Renkl presents a literary devotional: fifty-two chapters that follow the creatures and plants in her backyard over the course of a year. As we move through the seasons—from a crow spied on New Year’s Day, its resourcefulness and sense of community setting a theme for the year, to the lingering bluebirds of December, revisiting the nest box they used in spring—what develops is a portrait of joy and grief: joy in the ongoing pleasures of the natural world, and grief over winters that end too soon and songbirds that grow fewer and fewer.
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Unlistenable
- By maia simon on 04-07-24
By: Margaret Renkl
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Turning to Stone
- Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks
- By: Marcia Bjornerud
- Narrated by: Rebecca Stern
- Length: 9 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Earth has been reinventing itself for more than four billion years, keeping a record of its experiments in the form of rocks. Yet most of us live our lives on the planet with no idea of its extraordinary history, unable to interpret the language of the rocks that surround us. Geologist Marcia Bjornerud believes that our lives can be enriched by understanding our heritage on this old and creative planet. Contrary to their reputation, rocks have eventful lives—and they intersect with our own in surprising ways.
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Very unusual book by a profound writer
- By F Shaw on 09-17-24
By: Marcia Bjornerud
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Upstream
- The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen
- By: Dan Heath
- Narrated by: Dan Heath
- Length: 7 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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New York Times best-selling author Dan Heath examines how to prevent problems before they happen, drawing on insights from his innovative behavior research, as well as hundreds of new interviews with unconventional problem solvers. Most of us spend our days handling a deluge of pressing issues. We’re so accustomed to managing emergencies as they strike that we often don’t stop to think about how we could prevent crises before they happen. Why stop at treating the symptoms when you could develop a cure?
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Mixed review
- By Aaron on 12-09-20
By: Dan Heath
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Gathering Moss
- A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses
- By: Robin Wall Kimmerer
- Narrated by: Robin Wall Kimmerer
- Length: 7 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Living at the limits of our ordinary perception, mosses are a common but largely unnoticed element of the natural world. Gathering Moss is a beautifully written mix of science and personal reflection that invites listeners to explore and learn from the elegantly simple lives of mosses.
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Soul Stirring
- By KatieBourgeois on 02-23-19
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How to Say Babylon
- A Memoir
- By: Safiya Sinclair
- Narrated by: Safiya Sinclair
- Length: 16 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Throughout her childhood, Safiya Sinclair’s father, a volatile reggae musician and a militant adherent to a strict sect of Rastafari, was obsessed with the ever-present threat of the corrupting evils of the Western world outside their home, and worried that womanhood would make Safiya and her sisters morally weak and impure. For him, a woman’s highest virtue was her obedience.
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The ability of Safia to both tell a gut wrenching story while making beautiful art with her words.
- By Grandchampion on 07-21-24
By: Safiya Sinclair
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The Essential Rumi, New Expanded Edition
- By: Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, Coleman Barks - translator, John Moyne - translator, and others
- Narrated by: Robertson Dean
- Length: 9 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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This revised and expanded edition of The Essential Rumi includes a new introduction by Coleman Barks and more than 80 never-before-published poems. Through his lyrical translations, Coleman Barks has been instrumental in bringing this exquisite literature to a remarkably wide range of listeners, making the ecstatic, spiritual poetry of 13th-century Sufi mystic Rumi more popular than ever.
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Disappointed
- By G. Vidal on 04-09-20
By: Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, and others
Hala is the perfect reader for Oliver’s work
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An invitation to see with new eyes
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Beautiful essays
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Feet in the water and in the right direction
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Her love of nature.
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