Cannonball Read 11

Sticking it to Cancer One Book at a Time

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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, […]

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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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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.

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

National Poetry Month- what doesn’t kill you still hurts

Our Lady of the Ruins by Traci Brimhall

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When it comes to reading poetry, I tend to stick with the classic epic poems like Beowulf and The Odyssey or more contemporary YA poetry-as-novel (The Poet X, Brown Girl Dreaming). I can’t remember a time outside of a classroom when I read a poetry collection. So for the CBR book exchange last December, one of my suggestions for whomever was buying for me was a book of poems, and Cannonballer Bonnie sent me this slim but stunning and provocative collection by contemporary award-winning poet Traci Brimhall. I feel somewhat at a loss as to how to review poems, but […]

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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4/19/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:18 |

Now Hear This

The Poet X: A Novel by Elizabeth Acevedo

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The Poet X is a novel written in verse and the recipient of many prestigious awards including the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. In this impressive debut work, Elizabeth Acevedo demonstrates with passion and heart both the power and the vital necessity of being heard, especially when you are a young woman of color. And conversely, the novel shows the terrible destructive power of being silenced, ignored and relegated to an object, a mere physical body subject to the rules and punishments of others.  The Poet X is Xiomara Batista, the first generation daughter of immigrant parents from […]

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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3/11/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:12 |

Enduring a hundred humiliations, I can only cry in vain

Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940 by Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung

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  As immigrants from China arrived by boat to San Francisco in the early 1900s, they were detained at Angel Island to await determination of their immigration application. Men and women were separated and held for weeks to months at a time while awaiting entry in to the United States or deportation back to China. The progressively stricter immigration laws during that time were aimed at keeping Chinese immigrants out of the country. With no contact with their families, no freedom to wander the island, and nearly nothing at all to do, some immigrants began carving poems in to the […]

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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3/2/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:13 |

Bite-sized sorcery and sunshine

GMorning, GNight! little pep talks for me & you by Lin-Manuel Miranda

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I wanted my first read of this year, and my first CBR11 review, to be of Gmorning Gnight for a lot of reasons: Because I don’t know about you, but I could use some pep talks.  Because Lin-Manuel defines happiness to me, seems like maybe he’s a sorcerer, and somehow manages to elevate even tweets to an artform.  Because the illustrations of Jonny Sun shine with a Silverstein-ian simplicity that radiate glee and grace.   Because “its nice to have things to hold on to, some kindness right here, right in sight.  You can read this whenever you want to. It […]

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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2/27/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:1 |

The wise sense what is to come

The Collected Poems of C.P. Cavafy: A New Translation by C.P. Cavafy

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I know very little about poetry and even less about how to write about poetry, so to quote Prince, forgive me if this goes astray. I first heard of Cavafy when I was browsing through a book of gay love poems at Barnes and Noble back in my early twenties when I was first coming out. The simplicity of the poem made me think he was an ancient, perhaps the male equivalent of Sappho, but when I found this book, The Collected Poems of C.P. Cavafy, a few years ago and learned he lived in the 19th and early 20th […]

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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2/24/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:13 |


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