Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Poetry Stuff

The Hatred of Poetry by Ben Lerner

How to Read a Poem by Edward Hirsch

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CBR14Bingo – Verse The Hatred of Poetry This book is just fantastic. I’ve never not thoroughly enjoyed any of Ben Lerner’s books (and maybe one day I will read some of his poetry). He takes the topic of why people hate poetry and thinks through the wheres and whys of it — that it’s old, that it’s hard to read, that it’s oblique, and that it’s annoying. But he’s a poet and well, irony and all that. “Poetry arises from the desire to get beyond […]

The language of poetry is the exact opposite of the language of mass media,” I said, meaninglessly.

Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner

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This is a trickster novel at its finest. We meet Adam Gordon, grad student poet on a fellowship in Spain in spring of 2004 drunk, high, and on and off medication on his way to party at the start of this novel. We are meant quickly to understand that he is highly intelligent and kind of a moron at the same time, that he is a consummate liar and manipulator, and that he is also a kind of good poet, but that he’s terrified of […]

He swam back into himself.

The Topeka School by Ben Lerner

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This novel begins with a clear kind of balancing act happening. There’s an ambiguous to vague opening section where a boy named Darren is sitting in a police interrogation room dreaming about breaking the glass that he believes is hiding his interrogators. This story, in all italics, gets told through interstitial chapter in between the main narratives, pushing it to the periphery of the novel. From there we get an opening scene, a teenage boy drunk on a boat on a suburban lake looking for […]



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