Cannonball Read 13

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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“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 […]

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 […]



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