New Reviews: Poetry & Drama

An all-star cast of poets reads poet and critic Vijay Seshadri's selection of T.S. Eliot's most important and interesting works. Seshadri delivers his own fine introduction, which looks at why Eliot, in particular, is so important to the poets who came after him. The narrators--who include Joy Harjo, Eileen Myles, Natalie Diaz, and Jorie Graham--are acknowledging personal debts... Read More

Where do ethics and consciousness come from? Do they really exist? Playing a neuropsychologist and her billionaire think-tank-owning boss, television stalwarts Hannah Murray ("Game of Thrones") and Eddie Cahill ("CSI: NY") lead a fine LA Theatre Works cast in this spirited live recording of Tom Stoppard's 2015 satirical examination of how scientists do science. Mixing big... Read More

After taking us from Mesopotamia to Rome, this audiobook focuses primarily on English-language poetry. Brief excursions take place into other languages, but the only one whose poetry is considered in any real depth is English. Its exploration of that is pretty thorough, though, and Ralph Lister's narration is exemplary. He clearly differentiates between the historical and... Read More

In this third collection of poems by the 2020 Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jericho Brown, narrator JD Jackson steadily delivers a heartfelt narration of what Brown describes his book to be about: "the normalization of evil . . . and why these things, as heinous as they are, are normal in our time and in our culture." In this short audiobook, Jackson is clear, moderately... Read More