poetry

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CBR15 Passport! Book #1 – A book that is Not For Moi.

Mrs Death Misses Death by Salena Godden

January 31, 2023 by narfna 9 Comments

Oof, this was not for me. Like, so not for me that I maybe shouldn’t even be writing a review, because my brain just bounced off this after about ten pages and then just kept bouncing harder and harder. This is a speculative fiction, experimental novel by British poet Salena Godden about an anthropomorphized version of Death (here called Mrs. Death, personified by an older Black woman) and her connections to/conversations with a person called Wolf. In addition to the the prose actually feeling like […]

“Sometimes it seems like writing is the only way I keep from hurting.”

The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo

November 1, 2022 by Malin Leave a Comment

CBR14 Bingo: Verse (the whole book is written as poems) Xiomara and her brother Xavier (who Xiomara mostly refers to as Twin) are miracle babies, born late in life to their parents, who never believed they would have children. Growing up in Harlem, New York, they’re nevertheless part of the Dominican culture of their immigrant parents. Their mother is deeply religious and was possibly going to be a nun before she met their dad, whose wandering eye meant he got around plenty before marrying. While […]

“How much have you thrown away in your lifetime already? Do you ever think about it? Where does this plethora of leavings come from?

Cast Away: Poems for Out Time by Naomi Shihab Nye

October 23, 2022 by The Chancellor Leave a Comment

Cast Away: Poems for Our Time by Naomi Shihab Nye My rating: 4 of 5 stars I’ve always appreciated poetry as an art form and when I had to study them in class it was a nice change of pace from fiction. It’s interesting to see how different poets use words to create images and feelings that break the rules of standard grammar and syntax. Sometimes a poem, without all the rules, just hits harder than a book covering the same topic. I have my […]

“To die like the skylark”

The Slain Birds by Michael Longley

October 13, 2022 by tiny_bookbot Leave a Comment

CBR Bingo: Bird I joked a couple years ago that the best day is Wake Forest Press Book Club Day, in part because you never know when it’s going to happen. Wake Forest Press focuses on publishing Irish poetry, particularly the Irish poets who aren’t, say, Seamus Heaney or Eavan Boland and claimed by a Big Five publisher. Because it’s a small operation, books come out a bit irregularly and also during the pandemic, shipments were sometimes oddly spaced (I once got three volumes all […]

Keep Pursuing Your Dreams

For Every One by Jason Reynolds

September 10, 2022 by The Chancellor Leave a Comment

For Every One by Jason Reynolds My rating: 5 of 5 stars Written as a letter-in-verse, “For Everyone” is Jason Reynolds’s encouragement to keep pursuing your dreams. I wasn’t sure what to expect from this book when I picked it up from the book store shelf. I enjoy Jason Reynolds’s writing so that wasn’t a concern but at the time I hadn’t read a book that was one continuous poem. Even Reynolds himself said he wasn’t sure if this was a poem or a letter. […]

The Importance of Telling Stories

The Tiny Journalist by Naomi Shihab Nye