Long Way Down – 5/5 To paraphrase Jason Reynolds in an interview he gives at the end of the book, this is a combination of “Boyz in the Hood” and “A Christmas Carol.” As with other Jason Reynolds novels, there’s a central conflict between what a character feels is the right thing to do based on his lived experience, the implicit messages that happen around him, the images, his history, and lots of other coded and secretive influences versus the on the paper ethics of […]
CBR9 #6 – Crystal Flowers: Poems and a Libretto
In which Siege returns to ramble aimlessly about a museum visit and her new favorite poet.
Accessible Poetry Bursting with Heart
Poetry is something that a lot of us probably want to like, but we just can’t quite get there. Poets either write too much about flowers, or the writing is so opaque and pretentious that it’s pointless to try and decipher. It’s like reading a technical manual on how to fix an industrial HVAC unit – it’s another language entirely. Poetry should be the best of our language. It should sing and kick. It should change the way we view the world around us, even if it’s […]
They Can’t All Be Howl, I Guess
This is my first Ginsberg collection, and I’m not sure how many more I’m going to try. While the percussion and the music of some of the poems were fun and exhilarating, I found most of the book to be boring and tedious. Not all of it is Ginsberg’s fault. The book only covers the mid-1970s, and I wasn’t yet born, let alone sophisticated enough to understand world events via poems. I’m sure they would’ve hit me harder as a contemporary. What I did appreciate in […]
“The poems were cool. The best ones were like bombs, and when all the right words came together it was like an explosion.”
I’m still making my way through the constantly growing pile of books I need to read for work. I need to be able to comment on some of our “new and noteworthy” books picks, so if parents or teachers want recommendations, I can easily help them out. Oh, your kid likes dark fantasy and Neil Gaiman? Try The Girl Who Drank The Moon. You say your kid likes sports, but really isn’t much of a reader? Well, then get some books by Kwame Alexander. And […]
She was, all by herself, an entire tribe of contradictions
You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me is a memoir about Sherman Alexie’s mother Lillian, his childhood, and Native American history; it’s about grief, anger, and forgiveness; it’s about victims of abuse, their bullies, and fighting back as a point of honor. It’s about the specific lives of Lillian Alexie and her son, and the general experience of Native Americans in white America. Ultimately, in order to try to understand the mother who both gave him so much and hurt him so much, Alexie […]
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