New Reviews: Poetry & Drama

In a smooth voice and a measured tone, poet Terrance Hayes delivers 70 of his own sonnets condemning what he calls America's assassins: racism, violence, and prejudice against black people. In this National Book Award-nominated collection, Hayes unflinchingly criticizes President Trump and decries hate crimes against blacks throughout history. Hayes's political opinions are... Read More

Intimate, surreal, and devastatingly honest. Tony Award winners Nathan Lane and Andrew Garfield lead a superb Broadway cast in this audiobook revival of Tony Kushner's 1991 award-winning examination of the 1980s AIDS crisis in America. It is easy to forget how shaken and frightened the country, especially the gay community, was in the shadow of an unknown and lethal disease.... Read More

Leonard Cohen, narrating his audiobook of poems, provides listeners an opportunity to hear his unique intonation and pensive tone once more. First published in 2006, this collection features Cohen's thoughts and observations on sexual desire, getting older, and finding the truths in his everyday movements. Throughout, Cohen's voice resonates with intimacy. He notes the beauty... Read More

An audiobook may not be the best way to experience these love poems. Each one is gorgeous--and so gorgeously read by Armando Duran that the listener may want to stop after one or two and think about them, rather than moving straight through the collection. Neruda is the definitive Spanish-language poet of the twentieth century, and his love poems hold a place comparable to... Read More

An ensemble cast presents Sakata's powerful play about real-life Gordon Hirabayashi's courageous stand against the U.S. Government during WWII. After the Japanese-American was arrested for staying out after curfew, he took his case to the Supreme Court, where his conviction was upheld. It took an incredible 40 years before his conviction was overturned. L.A. Theatre Works'... Read More

With a quiet but driving intensity, Richard Blanco delivers poems that speak to our times. He addresses the push-pull of his identity as a Cuban-American, confronts his own mortality (his father died at 55), and touches on national tragedies such as the Pulse nightclub and Parkland high school mass shootings and the Boston bombing. In the affecting "November Eyes," the author... Read More

In this darkly comic 1939 Broadway classic, film and television veterans Joanne Whalley, Heidi Dippold, and Molly C. Quinn take center stage--an opportunity actresses didn't often find in mid-twentieth-century American theater. It's 1900 in the heart of Dixie, and two brothers are plotting to build a cotton mill with $75,000 "borrowed" from the family. Their sister, played with... Read More

Rooted in everyday experiences, Campbell McGrath's poems have a brevity and immediacy that adapt effectively to audiobook listening. His images are literal and direct, with few metaphors or "deeper meanings," and the poems don't require repeated listening. McGrath's voice doesn't sound professionally trained, but he is a good interpreter of his poems' rhythms and emphases, and... Read More

Full of easy humor and a wide-eyed sense of discovery, writer/comedian Aasif Mandvi reprises his 1998 Obie Award-winning one-man play about a young man who leaves his village in India to work in a Manhattan restaurant. He stays with the restaurant owner's family, and each member of the family has their own story to tell. Mandvi effortlessly hops from the individual voices and... Read More

With poignant grace, Keiko Agena, June Angela, and Suzy Nakamura lead a stellar cast, playing three Japanese-American sisters who find hope, heartache, and hard-won humor when they return to their family farm in California after four long years locked away in a Japanese internment camp during WWII. They had planned to pick up where they left off, but their father and mother are... Read More

Narrators Kit Harington and Johnny Flynn attack this 1980s drama by Sam Shepard aggressively--if in a way that is not quite true to character. Austen and Lee are estranged brothers who confront each other and their demons in their mother's L.A. kitchen. Harington's portrayal of Austen, the serious younger brother, is too similar to Flynn's Lee, the threatening derelict. Because... Read More

Chatting about topics both professional and personal, two female flight attendants--played by Upright Citizens Brigade alumna K.K. Glick and newcomer Grace Experience--ready their passengers for another routine flight in this likable and witty one-act production. Sadly, just as the listener is beginning to enjoy the show, the author breaks in time after time reading unnecessary... Read More