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Little Alleluias: Collected Poetry and Prose Audiobook
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Publisher Description
A curated compendium of poetry and prose from the award-winning poet Mary Oliver, including the book-length masterpiece The Leaf and the Cloud, the collection What Do We Know, andessays from Long Life—with a foreword by fellow Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Postcolonial Love Poem Natalie Diaz.
For the many admirers of Mary Oliver's breathtaking poetry of touch and transcendence, as well as for those coming to her words for the first time, Little Alleluias is a revelation.
These works observe, search, pause, astonish, and give thanks to both love and the natural world. In constant conversation with the sublime, (i.e. "Are you afraid? / Somewhere a thousand swans are flying / through winter's worst storm."), Oliver has the rare skill of rendering life: her poems bring movement to stillness, and people to the Earth, themselves, and each other. Her essays declare her heart and her home, too, alongside thoughts on Wordsworth, Emerson, and Hawthorne—the odes and elegies of Provincetown's resident poet.
Page by page, Mary Oliver invites us to walk through her minutes, her moments, and revere the light and dark and rainbowed clothes of world alongside her. With three distinct books collected in one volume for the first time, Little Alleluias asks what passes and what persists, and offers readers the peace that every mind deserves.
“Hers is a purposeful language, one that looks not just with attention but with sensual intention, and though awestruck, seeks to hold, even briefly, the unknowns of the energies that make any life. Little alleluias, she called her writings. Not meant to define but to praise, to rejoice in the maker and what has been made, to dare be heard as a whisper or a shout in this immense world.”—Natalie Diaz, in her Foreword
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“Golden Voice narrator Kimberly Farr reflects the shimmering light of Mary Oliver’s poetry and amplifies the meaning in her appealing prose. Farr simply gets Oliver’s nuance and grace and sound; as narrator, she has a gift for pace and knows just how to intensify and heighten the language…She lived a solitary life by the sea on Cape Cod. And the images of dolphins surrounding her and whales blowing mist and being bitten by a goose symbolize both the experiential and imaginative cast of her work. Her essays on Emerson and Hawthorne are writerly treats. This audiobook is a gift to the listener. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”
— AudioFile
Awards
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Winner of an AudioFile Earphones Award
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About Mary Oliver
Mary Oliver (1935–2019), an American poet, was a winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. And over the course of her long and illustrious career, she received numerous other awards, including the Shelley Memorial Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Achievement Award, the Christopher Award, the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award, the National Book Award, a Lannan Foundation Literary Award, and the New England Booksellers Association Award for Literary Excellence.
About the Narrators
Kimberly Farr is an actress and winner of more than a dozen AudioFile Earphones Awards for narration. In 2025 she was named a Golden Voice, AudioFile magazine’s lifetime achievement honor for audiobook narrators. She has appeared on Broadway and at the New York Shakespeare Festival, the Roundabout Theatre, Playwright’s Horizons, and the American Place. She created the role of “Eve” in Arthur Miller’s first and only musical, Up from Paradise, which was directed by the author. She appeared with Vanessa Redgrave in the Broadway production of The Lady from the Sea and has acted in regional theaters across the country, including a performance in the original production of The 1940’s Radio Hour at Washington, DC’s Arena Stage.
Natalie Diaz is the author of the poetry collection When My Brother Was an Aztec. She has received many honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship, a USA Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. She teaches at Arizona State University.