Kiese Laymon has narrated 2 audiobooks on Listento.it by 3 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.8★ across 42 ratings. The most-rated is Heavy.
Heavy
Summary
2018 Audible Audiobook of the Year! Winner of the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction! Winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal and Kirkus Prize Finalist! Named a Best Book of 2018 by The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, NPR, Broadly, Buzzfeed (Nonfiction), The Undefeated, Library Journal (Biography/Memoirs), The Washington Post (Nonfiction), Southern Living (Southern), Entertainment Weekly, and The New York Times Critics In this powerful and provocative memoir, genre-bending essayist and novelist Kiese Laymon explores what the weight of a lifetime of secrets, lies, and deception does to a Black body, a Black family, and a nation teetering on the brink of moral collapse. Kiese Laymon is a fearless writer. In his essays, personal stories combine with piercing intellect to reflect both on the state of American society and on his experiences with abuse, which conjure conflicted feelings of shame, joy, confusion, and humiliation. Laymon invites us to consider the consequences of growing up in a nation wholly obsessed with progress yet wholly disinterested in the messy work of reckoning with where we’ve been. In Heavy, Laymon writes eloquently and honestly about growing up a hard-headed Black son to a complicated and brilliant Black mother in Jackson, Mississippi. From his early experiences of sexual violence to his suspension from college to his trek to New York as a young college professor, Laymon charts his complex relationship with his mother, grandmother, anorexia, obesity, sex, writing, and ultimately gambling. By attempting to name secrets and lies he and his mother spent a lifetime avoiding, Laymon asks himself, his mother, his nation, and us to confront the terrifying possibility that few in this nation actually know how to responsibly love, and even fewer want to live under the weight of actually becoming free. A personal narrative that illuminates national failures, Heavy is defiant yet vulnerable, an insightful, often comical exploration of weight, identity, art, friendship, and family that begins with a confusing childhood - and continues through 25 years of haunting implosions and long reverberations.
©2018 Kiese Laymon (P)2018 Simon & Schuster
Bone
Summary
“yrsa daley-ward’s bone is a symphony of breaking and mending...she lays her hands on the pulse of the thing...an expert storyteller. of the rarest. and purest kind.” (nayyirah waheed, author of salt.) From the celebrated poet Yrsa Daley-Ward, a poignant collection of poems about the heart, life, and the inner self. Foreword by Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir Bone. Visceral. Close to. Stark. The poems in Yrsa Daley-Ward’s collection bone are exactly that: reflections on a particular life honed to their essence - so clear and pared-down, they become universal. From navigating the oft competing worlds of religion and desire, to balancing society’s expectations with the raw experience of being a woman in the world; from detailing the experiences of growing up as a first generation black British woman, to working through situations of dependence and abuse; from finding solace in the echoing caverns of depression and loss, to exploring the vulnerability and redemption in falling in love, each of the raw and immediate poems in Daley-Ward’s bone resonates to the core of what it means to be human. "You will come away bruised. You will come away bruised but this will give you poetry."
©2017 Yrsa Daley-Ward (P)2017 Penguin Audio