Cannonball Read 13

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Lightning Round

Tonguebreaker by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Batman Earth One, Vol. 3 by Geoff Johns

Solomon's Vineyard by Jonathan Latimer

Antartica: Journeys to the South Pole by Walter Dean Myers

When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead

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A few reviews of shorter books that I read quickly over the weekend and didn’t have extra time to flesh out… Tonguebreaker ***** Coming to terms with a society that doesn’t want you based on your body…and creating your own space instead…has to be a challenging thing. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha bares her soul to the world in this collection of poems and one-act plays. Her use of language to lecture gripped me and her exploration of what it means to live in this world, to […]

A thoughtful mix of poetry and fairy tales

The Seventh Raven by David Elliott

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The Seven Ravens is a cool fairy tale. It’s very similar to The Six Swans – both are categorized as “brothers who turn into birds” folktales. But I prefer The Seven Ravens. It focuses on a peasant family instead of a princess.  The parents are lovely people – no evil stepmothers or greedy fathers here.  A brave girl saves the day. And ravens are cooler than swans. Sorry, swans. If you don’t know the folktale, it is the story of a peasant couple who have […]

Saying goodbye to a favorite poet

The Historians by Eavan Boland

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I first encountered Eavan Boland’s poetry during my junior year study-abroad in Scotland. I did a course on contemporary Scottish and Irish literature that was, quite frankly, pretty damn formative, and when we got to Eavan Boland, I was hooked. She wrote with such candor about the experience of being a woman, and a woman poet, and about being an Irish woman poet, and the struggles of finding her place in a tradition where women were almost always the subjects of poems, not the creators. […]

“And if I speak of Paradise”

A Portable Paradise by Roger Robinson

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A Portable Paradise, Roger Robinson’s fourth poetry collection, didn’t come across my radar until it won the 2019 T. S. Eliot Prize for poetry. While literary prize culture is as fallible as, say, film awards like the Oscars, the TSE Prize shortlist is always interesting to look at, and the title poem immediately caught my interest. Unfortunately, it was incredibly hard to get my hands on a copy! Robinson’s publisher, Peepal Tree Press, is a small independent press, and it seems like demand for the […]

“Mama always knew the wrong thing to say.”

Beauty Mark: a Verse Novel of Marilyn Monroe by Carole Boston Weatherford

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In this slim volume, Weatherford imagines a memoir written by Monroe, chronicling her life from her tumultuous childhood in foster care to her troubled final days in her L.A. home.  It includes both personal, introspective pieces about Monroe’s internal struggles as well as pieces that catalog her film career and persona, and the public response to it. I devour any biographical media of Monroe’s as she is my number one icon. As a teen, I stole a poster of her from a neighboring school’s production […]



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