Cannonball Read 11

Sticking it to Cancer One Book at a Time

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It’s not the bad people who are brave I fear, it’s the good people who are afraid

American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes

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CBR11BINGO: Not  My Wheelhouse (BINGO! I Love This! corner to Award Winner corner) I read across a lot of genres, but I haven’t read poetry since I was in college a million years ago. Taking “Not My Wheelhouse” to mean something that I’m curious about but don’t tend to pick up, I landed on a poetry. I also landed on a poet who is not my wheelhouse. BlackRaven reviewed this a while back and said it best, I think: “I am sorry to say, I am probably not the target audience. And yet, everyone is the audience. ” Well said, […]

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We pay for our website first, and then all proceeds above and beyond those fees are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name. Find out how else you can help support our mission.

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9/11/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:32 |

Viscerally Real

The Savage Detectives by Robert Bolaño

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The Savage Detectives is a lot. Being my second Bolaño doorstopper of the year, I assumed I knew what I was in for. I was way off. This was a far more challenging read than 2666. It had its rewards and I’m glad I stuck with it. But I needed to take a break halfway through, at the risk of putting it aside for good. I’m glad I did because the plot is not the most important thing going on here. This can possibly be considered a hangout novel. Aside from the bookending sections that are narrations from someone’s journal, the bulk […]

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Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

We pay for our website first, and then all proceeds above and beyond those fees are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name. Find out how else you can help support our mission.

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8/17/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:78 |

Salt the earth outside the wheelhouse

she just wants to forget by r. h. sin

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I don’t read much poetry, and I read even less inspirational literature, so this is a twofer for my Not My Wheelhouse square. I feel like I’ve been asked to review The Room. As a comedy, this book gets 1000/5 stars (skip to the end for some schadenfreude). As a deep work of inspirational poetry, zero stars and I want the half hour this took me to read back.  There is a reason poetry is out of my wheelhouse, it can be amazing or a haven for people who feel like fewer words means you have to think less about […]

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Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

We pay for our website first, and then all proceeds above and beyond those fees are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name. Find out how else you can help support our mission.

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7/26/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:56 |

“We don’t know the people who live across the street or on either side of us.”

Pride by Ibi Zoboi

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cbr11bingo – Remix!  Zuri Benitez is of the rambling Benitez family. They live in Brooklyn – in Bushwick – in a one bedroom apartment where she and her four siblings share the living room as their bedroom, where block parties are regular and boisterous, and where she and her family and the neighborhood take care of each other. This is why Zuri views the new family across the street with suspicion. When a developer bought the property and revamped it into a flashy new home, the girls placed bets as to who’d move in – rich white folk trying out […]

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Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

We pay for our website first, and then all proceeds above and beyond those fees are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name. Find out how else you can help support our mission.

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7/22/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:48 |

Poetry for the non-fan

Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur

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(Trigger warning: this review will mention rape several times, though not in any graphic or descriptive way.) This is my annual foray into poetry thanks to my local library’s adult summer reading bingo challenge. Poetry is not at all my bag. I read one book a year and that’s it. As a friend of mine is fond of saying: I’m not trying to yuk anyone’s yum. But my joy as a reader comes from diving into a good story that will leave me challenged and, many times, guessing as to how it will unfold. Poetry doesn’t do that. If I’m […]

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Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

We pay for our website first, and then all proceeds above and beyond those fees are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name. Find out how else you can help support our mission.

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7/1/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:50 |

A middle-class, middle-aged poet of middling success

The Anthologist by Nicholson Bakker

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Nicholson Bakker apparently tends to write slow, thoughtful and literary texts- I say ‘apparently’ because I know this now, but not, unfortunately, when I started reading, and my expectations made for a disappointing reading experience.  Instead of ‘contemplative literary novel’, I was primed for ‘book-themed thriller’, largely because I’d picked up The Book Thief and The Thirteenth Tale around the same time as The Anthologist, and both of those books are thriller-esque.  All of which makes this review hard to write as an objective assessment of Bakker’s book- my dashed expectations are a very particular frame of reference.  In short, […]

Help Support Cannonball Read

Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

We pay for our website first, and then all proceeds above and beyond those fees are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name. Find out how else you can help support our mission.

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5/9/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:21 |

“We should teach our girls that snapping is ok, instead of waiting for someone else to break them.”

Shout by Laurie Halse Anderson

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I only learned that Laurie Halse Anderson wrote her modern classic and much challenged novel Speak in response to her own rape as a young teen. But where Melinda came to art to find her voice, Anderson came to writing. Anderson writes in verse that runs the gambit of emotion and holds no punches.  It is a memoir of her full life, opening with a reflection on her father, whose severe PTSD sets the tone for her complicated home (later reflected in her YA fiction The Knife of Impossible Memory). Her rape by a classmate as a middle-school student left her […]

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Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

  • Shout by Laurie Halse Anderson

We pay for our website first, and then all proceeds above and beyond those fees are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name. Find out how else you can help support our mission.

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4/26/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:27 |

Pretty Poems from a Local Artist

Nature's Secrecy: Collected Poems by Amiyo Basu

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Several years ago I reviewed David Byrne’s How Music Works. One of the most interesting things in Byrne’s book is how differently we experience music today than we did prior to the phonograph. Until that time, music was localized and live by necessity. Every version of a song you heard was likely an interpretation, a cover; there was no “definitive” album version of a song. Additionally, musical styles were also more local because it wasn’t feasible to keep up with artists or a favorite genre outside of where you lived. And vice versa. After reading that book, I became much more […]

Help Support Cannonball Read

Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

We pay for our website first, and then all proceeds above and beyond those fees are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name. Find out how else you can help support our mission.

Share the post "Pretty Poems from a Local Artist"

4/20/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:14 |


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