
Chlorophyll
Poems About Michigan's Upper Peninsula
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
$0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Buy for $6.95
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Rory Young
-
By:
-
Raymond Luczak
About this listen
Join me on a journey to the unspoiled forests of Upper Michigan.
A long time ago young men wishing to be tall
scaled the mast of my octopus arms
and scanned the horizon of Lake Superior
for a glimmer of Canada. Usually we were cut down....
For many of those who've lived there, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan can seem like a magical place because nature there feels so potent and, at times, full of mystery. After having grown up there, Raymond Luczak can certainly attest to its mythical powers. In Chlorophyll, he reimagines Lake Superior and its environs as well as his houseplants as a variety of imaginary and historical characters.
Ghosts dress in only gray and white.
This is how they camouflage their volcanic selves.
Lake Superior is bottled with them.
You can't see them but they move like fish....
"In Raymond Luczak's Chlorophyll, the devastating natural beauty of Michigan's Upper Peninsula is imbued with passions its reticent human inhabitants are loathe to express. Trees, lakes, and stones air their infatuations, their grudges, their mythologies and griefs. Through this forest of the otherwise unsaid, we catch glimpses of a speaker who knows there is no line to blur between 'person' and 'nature.'" (Emily Van Kley, author of Arrhythmia and The Rust and the Cold)
Spring is a girl who's cried all night
only to find that morning easily forgives
the coldness of him having left her
stranded among the thicket of evergreens....
"Giving voice to the natural world, Raymond Luczak allows the rocks, trees, lakes, insects, and flowers that are part of flora and fauna of the region to speak for themselves, and they remind us that we are human, living in a more than human world." (William Reichard, author of Our Delicate Barricades Downed and The Night Horse: New and Selected Poems)
"Evocative yet personal communing with nature. One of my sons summed up poetry as saying a lot with a few words. This collection does that. There is a piece of prose smuggled in and the poems vary in length considerably. There are some poems with traditional rhyme (and assonance) and the main themes are nature, anthropomorphised and used as metaphor. Dependability of nature and changing seasons also feature. The author reveals much of his story and relationships as well as the geography he inhabits and appreciates. I would advise reading this in small sips, as I did. That way you'll be able to savor the poems and their messages. I have deducted a star as many have already been published previously—and for the inclusion of prose (albeit informative) amongst the poems." (Daryl P. Goodwin, MD)
"Being born a Michigan girl and now living in Texas; I miss the seasons, the tall beautiful trees, the clear rushing water of the rivers, the many lakes, and of course the Great Lakes surrounding Michigan. This collection of poems paints the visuals into a picturesque moving picture of the landscape, Lake Superior, insects, trees, animals, flowers, grass, life and death, etc. You don't have to be a Michigander or an outdoorsman to appreciate nature's beauty coming to life in the spring, the lazy dog days of summer, the colorful and chillier days of autumn, and the frigid cold and stark white of winter. This collection provides escapism to ordinary day!" (Laura Spinnett)
©2022 Raymond Luczak (P)2022 Raymond LuczakListeners also enjoyed...
-
The Overstory
- By: Richard Powers
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 22 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fable that range from antebellum New York to the late 20th-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. An air force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits 100 years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light.
-
-
eye opening
- By Michael Stansberry on 05-23-18
By: Richard Powers
-
Something Wicked This Way Comes
- By: Ray Bradbury
- Narrated by: Christian Rummel
- Length: 9 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A carnival rolls in sometime after the midnight hour on a chill Midwestern October eve, ushering in Halloween a week before its time. A calliope's shrill siren song beckons to all with a seductive promise of dreams and youth regained. In this season of dying, Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show has come to Green Town, Illinois, to destroy every life touched by its strange and sinister mystery.
-
-
It's so creepy
- By Midwestbonsai on 11-14-14
By: Ray Bradbury
-
Long Live the Pumpkin Queen
- Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas
- By: Shea Ernshaw
- Narrated by: Cissy Jones
- Length: 6 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Sally Skellington is the official Pumpkin Queen after a whirlwind courtship with her true love, Jack, who Sally adores with every inch of her fabric seams—if only she could say the same for her new role as Queen of Halloween Town. She can't help but wonder if all she's done is trade her captivity under Dr. Finkelstein for a different cage. But when she and Zero accidentally uncover a doorway to an ancient realm called Dream Town, she'll unknowingly set into motion a chain of sinister events that put her future as Pumpkin Queen, and the future of Halloween Town itself, into jeopardy.
-
-
I love it!!!
- By River Works on 08-22-22
By: Shea Ernshaw
-
The Folk Keeper
- By: Franny Billingsley
- Narrated by: Marian Tomas Griffin
- Length: 4 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
“Here in the Cellar”, Corinna says, “I control the Folk. Here, I’m queen of the world”. As Folk Keeper at the Rhysbridge Home, she feeds the fierce, dark-dwelling cave Folk; keeps them from souring the milk, killing the chickens, and venting their anger on the neighborhood; and writes it all down in her Folk Record. Since only boys are Folk Keepers, she has disguised herself as a boy, Corin, and it is a boy and a Folk Keeper she intends to stay. Yet there comes a moment when someone else knows the truth.
-
-
So charming!
- By Amandah on 11-10-10
-
Dearly
- New Poems
- By: Margaret Atwood
- Narrated by: Margaret Atwood
- Length: 1 hr and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Dearly, Margaret Atwood’s first collection of poetry in over a decade, Atwood addresses themes such as love, loss, the passage of time, the nature of nature and—zombies. Her new poetry is introspective and personal in tone, but wide-ranging in topic. In poem after poem, she casts her unique imagination and unyielding, observant eye over the landscape of a life carefully and intuitively lived.
-
-
Heavy!
- By Martha Alcantar on 12-29-20
By: Margaret Atwood
-
The Vine That Ate the South
- By: J. D. Wilkes
- Narrated by: T. Ryder Smith
- Length: 5 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In a forgotten corner of western Kentucky lies a haunted forest referred to locally as "The Deadening", where vampire cults roam wild and time is immaterial. Our protagonist and his accomplice - the one and only Carver Canute - set out down the Old Spur Line in search of the legendary Kudzu House, where an old couple is purported to have been swallowed whole by a hungry vine.
-
-
A beutiful and accurate tale of the South!
- By Cedarlamb on 03-20-20
By: J. D. Wilkes
-
The Overstory
- By: Richard Powers
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 22 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fable that range from antebellum New York to the late 20th-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. An air force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits 100 years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light.
-
-
eye opening
- By Michael Stansberry on 05-23-18
By: Richard Powers
-
Something Wicked This Way Comes
- By: Ray Bradbury
- Narrated by: Christian Rummel
- Length: 9 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A carnival rolls in sometime after the midnight hour on a chill Midwestern October eve, ushering in Halloween a week before its time. A calliope's shrill siren song beckons to all with a seductive promise of dreams and youth regained. In this season of dying, Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show has come to Green Town, Illinois, to destroy every life touched by its strange and sinister mystery.
-
-
It's so creepy
- By Midwestbonsai on 11-14-14
By: Ray Bradbury
-
Long Live the Pumpkin Queen
- Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas
- By: Shea Ernshaw
- Narrated by: Cissy Jones
- Length: 6 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Sally Skellington is the official Pumpkin Queen after a whirlwind courtship with her true love, Jack, who Sally adores with every inch of her fabric seams—if only she could say the same for her new role as Queen of Halloween Town. She can't help but wonder if all she's done is trade her captivity under Dr. Finkelstein for a different cage. But when she and Zero accidentally uncover a doorway to an ancient realm called Dream Town, she'll unknowingly set into motion a chain of sinister events that put her future as Pumpkin Queen, and the future of Halloween Town itself, into jeopardy.
-
-
I love it!!!
- By River Works on 08-22-22
By: Shea Ernshaw
-
The Folk Keeper
- By: Franny Billingsley
- Narrated by: Marian Tomas Griffin
- Length: 4 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
“Here in the Cellar”, Corinna says, “I control the Folk. Here, I’m queen of the world”. As Folk Keeper at the Rhysbridge Home, she feeds the fierce, dark-dwelling cave Folk; keeps them from souring the milk, killing the chickens, and venting their anger on the neighborhood; and writes it all down in her Folk Record. Since only boys are Folk Keepers, she has disguised herself as a boy, Corin, and it is a boy and a Folk Keeper she intends to stay. Yet there comes a moment when someone else knows the truth.
-
-
So charming!
- By Amandah on 11-10-10
-
Dearly
- New Poems
- By: Margaret Atwood
- Narrated by: Margaret Atwood
- Length: 1 hr and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Dearly, Margaret Atwood’s first collection of poetry in over a decade, Atwood addresses themes such as love, loss, the passage of time, the nature of nature and—zombies. Her new poetry is introspective and personal in tone, but wide-ranging in topic. In poem after poem, she casts her unique imagination and unyielding, observant eye over the landscape of a life carefully and intuitively lived.
-
-
Heavy!
- By Martha Alcantar on 12-29-20
By: Margaret Atwood
-
The Vine That Ate the South
- By: J. D. Wilkes
- Narrated by: T. Ryder Smith
- Length: 5 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In a forgotten corner of western Kentucky lies a haunted forest referred to locally as "The Deadening", where vampire cults roam wild and time is immaterial. Our protagonist and his accomplice - the one and only Carver Canute - set out down the Old Spur Line in search of the legendary Kudzu House, where an old couple is purported to have been swallowed whole by a hungry vine.
-
-
A beutiful and accurate tale of the South!
- By Cedarlamb on 03-20-20
By: J. D. Wilkes
-
The Shell Collector
- By: Anthony Doerr
- Narrated by: Hakeem Kae Kazim
- Length: 7 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The exquisitely crafted stories in Anthony Doerr's acclaimed debut collection take listeners from the African coast to the pine forests of Montana to the damp moors of Lapland, charting a vast physical and emotional landscape. Doerr explores the human condition in all its varieties - metamorphosis, grief, fractured relationships, and slowly mending hearts - and conjures nature in both its beautiful abundance and crushing power.
-
-
Narrator not appropriate to the book.
- By Janet on 02-18-17
By: Anthony Doerr
-
Time Is a Mother
- By: Ocean Vuong
- Narrated by: Ocean Vuong
- Length: 1 hr and 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of personal and social loss, embodying the paradox of sitting in grief while being determined to survive beyond it. Shifting through memory, and in concert with the themes of his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong contends with the meaning of family and the cost of being the product of an American war in America. At once vivid, brave, and propulsive, these poems circle fragmented lives to find both restoration as well as the epicenter of the break.
-
-
solomn
- By Camille on 09-05-24
By: Ocean Vuong
-
Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl
- Wide-Eyed Wonder in God's Spoken World
- By: N. D. Wilson
- Narrated by: N. D. Wilson
- Length: 5 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
What is this world? What kind of place is it? The round kind. The spinning kind. The moist kind. The inhabited kind. The kind with flamingos (real and artificial). The kind where water in the sky turns into beautifully symmetrical crystal flakes sculpted by artists unable to stop themselves (in both design and quantity). The kind of place with tiny, powerfully jawed mites assigned to the carpets to eat my dead skin as it flakes off....
-
-
Captivating!
- By C.G. on 11-08-18
By: N. D. Wilson
-
Other Voices, Other Rooms
- By: Truman Capote
- Narrated by: Cody Roberts
- Length: 6 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
At the age of 12, Joel Knox is summoned to meet the father who abandoned him at birth. But when Joel arrives at the decaying mansion in Skully's Landing, his father is nowhere in sight. What he finds instead is a sullen stepmother who delights in killing birds; an uncle with the face - and heart - of a debauched child; and a fearsome little girl named Idabel who may offer him the closest thing he has ever known to love.
-
-
Capote’s coming of age story
- By Daniel Diffin on 11-08-23
By: Truman Capote
-
Into the Forest
- By: Jean Hegland
- Narrated by: Alyssa Bresnahan
- Length: 10 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
As America collapses in the chaos of war, pollution, and bankruptcy, two sisters pool their resources to survive alone in the hills above San Francisco. Although dwindling food and increasing isolation threaten them, they soon find a more immediate danger standing at their door. When a young man arrives, his friendship offers tantalizing fulfillment, but his love threatens to divide the sisters.
-
-
Depressing, boring, & disturbing
- By The Ropers on 07-14-16
By: Jean Hegland
-
How to Fly (in Ten Thousand Easy Lessons)
- Poetry
- By: Barbara Kingsolver
- Narrated by: Barbara Kingsolver
- Length: 2 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In her second poetry collection, Barbara Kingsolver offers reflections on the practical, the spiritual, and the wild. She begins with "how to" poems addressing everyday matters such as being hopeful, married, divorced; shearing a sheep; praying to unreliable gods; doing nothing at all; and of course, flying. Next come rafts of poems about making peace (or not) with the complicated bonds of friendship and family, and making peace (or not) with death, in the many ways it finds us.
-
-
A Joy to Read
- By Lee Moderow on 05-20-21
-
Angelique's Descent
- By: Lara Parker
- Narrated by: Lara Parker
- Length: 16 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The dashing heir of a New England shipping magnate, Barnabas Collins captures the heart of the exquisite, young Angelique amidst the sensual beauty of Martinique, her island home. But Angelique's brief happiness is doomed when Barnabas deserts her and becomes engaged to another. With this one betrayal, Barnabas unleashes an evil that will torment him for all time.
-
-
I loved this!
- By Alabama purchaser on 07-19-15
By: Lara Parker
-
Good Poems
- Selected and Introduced by Garrison Keillor
- By: Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, and others
- Narrated by: Garrison Keillor
- Length: 4 hrs and 23 mins
- Abridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Good Poems includes poems about lovers, children, failure, everyday life, death, and transcendence. It features the work of classic poets, such as Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Robert Frost, as well as the work of contemporary greats such as Howard Nemerov, Charles Bukowski, Donald Hall, Billy Collins, Robert Bly, and Sharon Olds Good Poems includes poems about lovers, children, failure, everyday life, death, and transcendence.
-
-
Very good, but. . .
- By KSmith on 01-27-11
By: Emily Dickinson, and others
-
O Caledonia
- A Novel
- By: Elspeth Barker
- Narrated by: Eilidh Beaton
- Length: 6 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the tradition of Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, a darkly humorous modern classic of Scottish literature about a doomed adolescent growing up in the mid-19th century—featuring a new introduction by Maggie O’Farrell, award-winning author of Hamnet.
-
-
A great novel .
- By Amazon Customer on 01-27-23
By: Elspeth Barker
-
Deathless
- By: Catherynne M. Valente
- Narrated by: Kim de Blecourt
- Length: 11 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Koschei the Deathless is to Russian folklore what devils or wicked witches are to Western European culture: a menacing, evil figure; the villain of countless stories that have been passed on through story and text for generations. But Koschei has never before been seen through the eyes of Catherynne Valente, whose modernized and transformed take on the legend brings the action to modern times, spanning many of the great developments of Russian history in the 20th century.
-
-
My Favorite Fantasy Book of the Year
- By Robert on 12-29-13
-
Cider with Rosie
- By: Laurie Lee
- Narrated by: Laurie Lee
- Length: 7 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Cider with Rosie is a wonderfully vivid memoir of childhood in a remote Cotswold village, a village before electricity or cars, a timeless place on the verge of change. Growing up amongst the fields and woods and characters of the place, Laurie Lee depicts a world that is both immediate and real and belongs to a now-distant past.
-
-
Trigger Warning
- By TiffanyD on 08-11-19
By: Laurie Lee
-
Thistlefoot
- A Novel
- By: GennaRose Nethercott
- Narrated by: January LaVoy
- Length: 14 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Yaga siblings—Bellatine, a young woodworker, and Isaac, a wayfaring street performer and con artist—have been estranged since childhood, separated both by resentment and by wide miles of American highway. But when they learn that they are to receive an inheritance, the siblings agree to meet—only to discover that their bequest isn’t land or money, but something far stranger: a sentient house on chicken legs.
-
-
I can't decide if I liked it
- By Lorraine Cannon on 11-03-22
What listeners say about Chlorophyll
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Kindle Customer
- 10-12-22
very good
Loved it !! this story. the narrator is so fantastic it's like your really there!! good overall
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!