This play about an English professor dying of cancer is astonishingly good. It's biting and bleakly funny and heartbreaking, and when I got to the back and read in the "about the author" section that it was Edson's first play I nearly threw up my hands and gave up writing altogether, because it's just plain horrifying to be so good on your first shot. The combination of Donne's sonnets and biochemistry, the jumping back and forth between English and science, between past and present, is done so easily. So easily. I'm sure it wasn't anywhere near effortless but Edson makes it look that way. And the main character is so compelling, so uncompromising and so brutally honest in her reactions to what is happening to her.

There's nothing about this that I don't love.