
What the Living Do
Poems
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed

Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Buy for $7.79
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Marie Howe
-
By:
-
Marie Howe
About this listen
Informed by the death of a beloved brother, here are the stories of childhood, its thicket of sex and sorrow and joy, boys and girls growing into men and women, stories of a brother who in his dying could teach how to be most alive.
What the Living Do reflects “a new form of confessional poetry, one shared to some degree by other women poets such as Sharon Olds and Jane Kenyon. Unlike the earlier confessional poetry of Plath, Lowell, Sexton et al., Howe’s writing is not so much a moan or a shriek as a song. It is a genuinely feminine form…a poetry of intimacy, witness, honesty, and relation” (Boston Globe).
This audio edition of What the Living Do is beautifully read by the author. Produced and published by Echo Point Books & Media, an independent bookseller in Brattleboro, Vermont.
Cover photograph: Song of Sentient Beings (1134) by Bill Jacobson (1994), used with permission. ©1998 Marie Howe §
Listeners also enjoyed...
-
Modern Poetry
- Poems
- By: Diane Seuss
- Narrated by: Diane Seuss
- Length: 2 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Diane Seuss's signature voice—audacious in its honesty, virtuosic in its artistry, outsider in its attitude—has become one of the most original in contemporary poetry. Her latest collection takes its title, Modern Poetry, from the first textbook Seuss encountered as a child and the first poetry course she took in college, as an enrapt but ill-equipped student, one who felt poetry was beyond her reach. Many of the poems make use of the forms and terms of musical and poetic craft and contend with the works of writers overrepresented in textbooks and anthologies and those often underrepresented.
By: Diane Seuss
-
The Carrying
- Poems
- By: Ada Limón
- Narrated by: Ada Limón
- Length: 1 hr and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Vulnerable, tender, acute, these are serious poems, brave poems, exploring with honesty the ambiguous moment between the rapture of youth and the grace of acceptance. A daughter tends to aging parents. A woman struggles with infertility—“What if, instead of carrying / a child, I am supposed to carry grief?”—and a body seized by pain and vertigo as well as ecstasy. A nation convulses: “Every song of this country / has an unsung third stanza, something brutal.” And still Limón shows us, as ever, the persistence of hunger, love, and joy, the dizzying fullness of our too-short lives.
-
-
The Calm, Serene Tone of Her Voice
- By Tom on 05-31-24
By: Ada Limón
-
Devotions
- The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver
- By: Mary Oliver
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
- Length: 6 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver presents a personal selection of her best work in this definitive collection spanning more than five decades of her esteemed literary career.
-
-
Humanity’s connection to all life.
- By Anonymous User on 02-25-25
By: Mary Oliver
-
The Hurting Kind
- By: Ada Limón
- Narrated by: Ada Limón
- Length: 1 hr and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
An astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves—from National Book Critics Circle Award winner, National Book Award finalist and U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón.
-
-
The Beauty of her insights
- By Tom on 07-30-24
By: Ada Limón
-
Letters to a Young Poet
- A New Translation and Commentary
- By: Rainer Maria Rilke, Anita Barrows - translator, Joanna Macy - translator
- Narrated by: Trevor White
- Length: 1 hr and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
German poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s (1875-1926) Letters to a Young Poet has been treasured for nearly a century. Rilke’s personal reflections on the vocation of writing and the experience of living urge an aspiring poet to look inward, while also offering sage wisdom on further issues including gender, solitude, and romantic love. Barrows and Macy’s translation extends this compilation of timeless advice and wisdom to a fresh generation of readers and listeners.
-
-
Watch out
- By Juan Garzón on 01-08-23
By: Rainer Maria Rilke, and others
-
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
- By: Omar El Akkad
- Narrated by: Omar El Akkad
- Length: 5 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
As an immigrant who came to the West, El Akkad believed that it promised freedom. A place of justice for all. But in the past twenty years, reporting on the War on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, and more, and watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, El Akkad has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie. That there will always be entire groups of human beings it has never intended to treat as fully human—not just Arabs or Muslims or immigrants, but whoever falls outside the boundaries of privilege.
-
-
Outstanding - Should be required reading
- By Steve Siegmund on 03-19-25
By: Omar El Akkad
-
Modern Poetry
- Poems
- By: Diane Seuss
- Narrated by: Diane Seuss
- Length: 2 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Diane Seuss's signature voice—audacious in its honesty, virtuosic in its artistry, outsider in its attitude—has become one of the most original in contemporary poetry. Her latest collection takes its title, Modern Poetry, from the first textbook Seuss encountered as a child and the first poetry course she took in college, as an enrapt but ill-equipped student, one who felt poetry was beyond her reach. Many of the poems make use of the forms and terms of musical and poetic craft and contend with the works of writers overrepresented in textbooks and anthologies and those often underrepresented.
By: Diane Seuss
-
The Carrying
- Poems
- By: Ada Limón
- Narrated by: Ada Limón
- Length: 1 hr and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Vulnerable, tender, acute, these are serious poems, brave poems, exploring with honesty the ambiguous moment between the rapture of youth and the grace of acceptance. A daughter tends to aging parents. A woman struggles with infertility—“What if, instead of carrying / a child, I am supposed to carry grief?”—and a body seized by pain and vertigo as well as ecstasy. A nation convulses: “Every song of this country / has an unsung third stanza, something brutal.” And still Limón shows us, as ever, the persistence of hunger, love, and joy, the dizzying fullness of our too-short lives.
-
-
The Calm, Serene Tone of Her Voice
- By Tom on 05-31-24
By: Ada Limón
-
Devotions
- The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver
- By: Mary Oliver
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
- Length: 6 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver presents a personal selection of her best work in this definitive collection spanning more than five decades of her esteemed literary career.
-
-
Humanity’s connection to all life.
- By Anonymous User on 02-25-25
By: Mary Oliver
-
The Hurting Kind
- By: Ada Limón
- Narrated by: Ada Limón
- Length: 1 hr and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
An astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves—from National Book Critics Circle Award winner, National Book Award finalist and U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón.
-
-
The Beauty of her insights
- By Tom on 07-30-24
By: Ada Limón
-
Letters to a Young Poet
- A New Translation and Commentary
- By: Rainer Maria Rilke, Anita Barrows - translator, Joanna Macy - translator
- Narrated by: Trevor White
- Length: 1 hr and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
German poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s (1875-1926) Letters to a Young Poet has been treasured for nearly a century. Rilke’s personal reflections on the vocation of writing and the experience of living urge an aspiring poet to look inward, while also offering sage wisdom on further issues including gender, solitude, and romantic love. Barrows and Macy’s translation extends this compilation of timeless advice and wisdom to a fresh generation of readers and listeners.
-
-
Watch out
- By Juan Garzón on 01-08-23
By: Rainer Maria Rilke, and others
-
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
- By: Omar El Akkad
- Narrated by: Omar El Akkad
- Length: 5 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
As an immigrant who came to the West, El Akkad believed that it promised freedom. A place of justice for all. But in the past twenty years, reporting on the War on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, and more, and watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, El Akkad has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie. That there will always be entire groups of human beings it has never intended to treat as fully human—not just Arabs or Muslims or immigrants, but whoever falls outside the boundaries of privilege.
-
-
Outstanding - Should be required reading
- By Steve Siegmund on 03-19-25
By: Omar El Akkad
-
The Sea, the Sea
- By: Iris Murdoch, Mary Kinzie - introduction
- Narrated by: Simon Vance, Kimberly Farr
- Length: 21 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Charles Arrowby, leading light of England's theatrical set, retires from glittering London to an isolated home by the sea. He plans to write a memoir about his great love affair with Clement Makin, his mentor, both professionally and personally, and amuse himself with Lizzie, an actress he has strung along for many years.
-
-
Murdoch Amazes
- By Sara on 08-30-17
By: Iris Murdoch, and others
-
Useful Junk
- American Poets Continuum Series
- By: Erika Meitner
- Narrated by: Erika Meitner
- Length: 2 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Useful Junk includes a series of poem-letters that began as a digital correspondence between the author (a Gen-X English professor in rural Virginia with two kids) and a young writer (a Millennial former tech industry worker in New York coming to terms with her queer identity after a recent miscarriage). These poems explore the unique dynamic of online cross-generational friendships and the life lessons both women learned from each other.
By: Erika Meitner
-
Howl and Other Poems
- By: Allen Ginsberg
- Narrated by: Allen Ginsberg
- Length: 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Including: "Europe, Europe", "America", "Howl", and more!
-
-
Original blasts from the normalest of decades
- By christo on 07-05-24
By: Allen Ginsberg
-
Judas Goat
- Poems
- By: Gabrielle Bates
- Narrated by: Gabrielle Bates
- Length: 1 hr and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Gabrielle Bates's electric debut collection Judas Goat plumbs the depths of intimate relationships. The book's eponymous animal is used to lead sheep to slaughter, while its own life is spared, and its harrowing existence echoes through this spellbinding collection of forty poems, which wrestle with betrayal and forced obedience, violence and young womanhood, and the "forbidden felt language" of sexual and sacred love.
-
-
Unforgettable Images…and more
- By EB on 02-04-23
By: Gabrielle Bates
-
Boy Parts
- By: Eliza Clark
- Narrated by: Eliza Clark
- Length: 8 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Irina obsessively takes explicit photographs of the average-looking men she persuades to model for her, scouted from the streets of Newcastle. Placed on sabbatical from her dead-end bar job, she is offered an exhibition at a fashionable London gallery, promising to revive her career in the art world and offering an escape from her rut of drugs, alcohol and extreme cinema. The news triggers a self-destructive tailspin, centred around Irina's relationship with her obsessive best friend and a shy young man from her local supermarket who has attracted her attention....
-
-
A modern American psycho but British
- By sofia on 09-23-21
By: Eliza Clark
-
Marigold and Rose
- A Fiction
- By: Louise Glück
- Narrated by: Louise Glück
- Length: 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
“Marigold was absorbed in her book; she had gotten as far as the V.” So begins Marigold and Rose, Louise Glück’s astonishing chronicle of the first year in the life of twin girls. Imagine a fairy tale that is also a multigenerational saga; a piece for two hands that is also a symphony; a poem that is also, in the spirit of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, an incandescent act of autobiography. Here are the elements you’d expect to find in a story of infant twins—but more than that, Marigold and Rose is an investigation of the great mystery of language and of time itself.
By: Louise Glück
Review of “What the Living Do”
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
And Howe is a wonderful story teller as well as poet...
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Masterful
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.