Cannonball Read 13

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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CBR13 #2: A Book of Luminous Things – Edited by Czesław Miłosz

A Book of Luminous Things by Czesław Miłosz

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I don’t think I’ve read a poetry anthology since college — and even then, I mostly just read the poems we were studying and ignored both the commentary and all the other poems. A Norton Anthology of Poetry can be a very intimidating book, after all. I didn’t actually intend to read one this time, either. However, I happened to come across a poem by Eastern European poet Czesław Miłosz which I liked, and when I googled him I discovered he’d edited this anthology. I figured […]

Hwæt? Bro!

Beowulf: A New Translation by Maria Dahvana Headley

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I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m not much one for reading poetry. I don’t know if I have some sort of mental tone-deafness or some other strange issue, but I can never get the cadence and tone right in my head. It has to be read aloud. Now while this is something that I can do myself, I prefer having poetry read to me. This was something Maria Dahvana Headley had in mind when she was working on a more contemporary translation of […]

I guess I just don’t get the “narrative in verse” sensibility.

SHOUT by Laurie Halse Anderson

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This three (and a half) star rating is entirely personal preference. I just would prefer that this book was in prose instead of verse. I would nearly always prefer a work be in verse if it is possible. Obviously if your aim is to write poems, individually crafted ones with like, a poetic aim or whatever (I have no idea why poets do what they do) that’s not gonna work. But here, this is a memoir, and while there were several “poems” that worked as […]

Catching Up

Matchmaking for Beginners by Maddie Dawson

Nothing Is Okay by Rachel Wiley

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Whoops. Apparently my CBR 12 goal was 26 books, not 13. Two reviews here, and then we’ll see if it’s possible for me to read 2 more books and review them over the next week. Nothing Is Okay by Rachel Wiley is a book of poetry that I initially hadn’t planned to review because I don’t really know how to review a poetry book. But I’ll give it my best shot. Wiley is a fat, queer, woman of color, and she is unabashedly all of […]

In this game of life, your family is the court and your ball is your heart.

Crossover by Kwame Alexander

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This gem was given to me by Black Raven through last year’s CBR holiday book exchange. Most likely, I would have never come across this book on my own, so a big thanks to Black Raven. It took me almost a year to crack it open but it was probably one of the best books that I read all year. Not to continue to beat the same sad drum, but I have had a hard time reading this year. I know that I am not […]



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