Portside

Part 2 of Baz Luhrmann’s Netflix series about hip-hop’s origins continues the squandering of great material and talent.

You might never see a more powerful, stunning production of Eugene O'Neill's "The Hairy Ape" than this one directed by Richard Jones and starring Bobby Cannavale at the Park Avenue Armory. This is a play about class, and class consciousness.

If History is a room, writes the California poet Henry 7, reneau jr., there are reasons why he cannot enter, reasons that disqualify him as a person of interest in history, reasons he cannot comply with: "i would have to bridge the distance between get rich or die tryin'," not to mention his desire not to be complicit.

Attempting to make a silk purse out of a proverbial sow's ear, the author and the volume's contributors envision, either realistically or ironically, how building a wall on the U.S.- Mexican border could be artistically or environmentally pleasing, leaving aside ethical questions of migrants' rights or even how such a wall would be anything but a glaring insult to those living south of it.

Olio, by Tyehimba Jess, has just been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. It is an outstanding book that visits, and reimagines, a deeply influential yet far too little examined African American cultural moment. This is a powerful, innovative work of verse created by one of this country's best contemporary poets. Here is a review.

Director Larraín has stated that the way Latin Americans think is shaped by poetry, by metaphor, and that his film is partly concerned with the power of poetry to move and influence. We are shown Neruda’s huge influence, as a communist poet, over his natural constituency: the ordinary working man... But what we do not see in the film is the immensely moving capacity of poetry to break down barriers between people of diametrically opposed political beliefs.

Big Little Lies and the problems of whiteness, access, class, and privilege intersecting with feminism.

In a country with Latin America’s highest death rate from diabetes, peasant communities are at risk thanks in part to Coca Cola addiction.

The Persian American poet draws on ancient tradition to condemn a certain political leader's confusion of truth and falsehood in our own times.

Critiquing a somewhat fawning book by a well-trod biographer of the Atlantic aristocracy, the reviewer nevertheless finds enough merit in the work to present a picture of the royals and their long-suffering and sometimes insufferable prince as a window on Britain's royal family and a glimmer as to why masses of British subjects still revere the preposterous institution.