Poetry Audiobooks to Listen to While Folding Laundry

About girlhood, true crime obsession, and being a millennial

Oct 22, 2024

Hi, friend.

Welcome to another edition of Crooked Reads, a monthly(ish) collection of bite-sized reviews about books on a theme. The newsletter will always be free to read. Consider becoming a paid subscriber or sending me a book from my wishlist to support my work!

I don’t know about you, but folding and putting away laundry is one of my biggest struggles. Another is reading poetry. A solution I’ve been testing out, with a bit of success, is combining the two! I get to listen to an audiobook in a form I usually feel just isn’t meant for me, which helps break down that barrier. And my laundry gets put away, revealing that I do in fact have carpet in my bedroom. A real win-win.

These collections have similar themes of girlhood/womanhood and being a human in this weird world we live in. They’re funny and dark and soft and powerful all at once.

The books

A collage of book covers: Life of the Party, A Bit Much, and And Yet.

Life of the Party by Olivia Gatwood

Talk about a punch in the gut. Life of the Party captures the tweeness of girlhood and coming-of-age, followed by fear and an obsession with violence against women. Many of the poems in this collection focus on the anxiety that women who inhale true crime stories carry with them everywhere. Doing this on audiobook is perfect, as Gatwood reads it herself with her powerful performance skills.

A Bit Much by Lyndsay Rush

The genius behind Mary Oliver's Drunk Substack (@MaryOliversDrunkCousin) delivers a witty and moving collection about big feelings and being a millennial woman, meant for people who don’t know yet that they even like poetry. Rush is so smart and her writing is snappy—I cackled my way through more than one poem about the patriarchy / being child-free / eating Doritos. But A Bit Much is also full of heart, and separated into different sections based on mood, which is a really beautiful concept.

And Yet by Kate Baer

Kate Baer is the real deal. These gorgeous poems about friendship and marriage and motherhood and COVID and loss hit me hard. I found myself pausing and going back to listen to poems again and again because they were too good to hear just once. Here’s one that continues to stop me in my tracks:

I will enjoy this life. I will open it
like a peach in season, suck the juice
from every finger, run my tongue over
my chin. I will not worry about clichés
or uninvited guests peering in my windows.
I will love and be loved. Save and be saved
a thousand times. I will let the want into
my body, bless the heat under my skin.
My life, I will not waste it. I will enjoy this life.

The links

Many thanks to Kelly Jensen for boosting Crooked Reads in this great post about the bookish world on Substack over at School Library Journal: Improve Your Social Media Life.

Here’s a great list from What To Read If for those of us who find ourselves Very Online.

The nightstand

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I’ve been finding it impossible to focus on any book in print lately, but Lana Ferguson has come to my rescue again with The Game Changer. I knew a hockey romance was just what I needed! Up next, her forthcoming Under Loch and Key, because who doesn’t want a Loch Ness Monster romance?