New Reviews: Poetry & Drama

Actor David Duchovny's day job kept him from completing his Ph.D. in literature, but his poetry is full of allusions to his extensive education. In his own reading of his work, the poems come across as deeply personal and honest, sometimes too much so when they fall into self-indulgence. But his fans will learn much about his interior life from this collection. The performance... Read More

The poet and critic Terrance Hayes named Patricia Smith the most important and interesting Black poet writing today. He didn't mention, however, the excellence of her performance of her work. This audiobook brings together her most recent poetry and a selection of older poems, giving the listener a fine idea of her career so far. Both the poems and Smith's readings are full of... Read More

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. This extraordinary collection of two volumes of poems and a third of prose shows the... Read More

Many poets, as they age, start writing more and more about death. Kevin Young, author and narrator of this collection, is only in his mid-50s, but his concern in these works is not only his own death. He thinks about that, of course, but also about the deaths of others and how people deal with the deaths of those they know and love. Young also attends to other issues; poems... Read More