Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Dear friends I cannot rescue you”

If All the World and Love Were Young by Stephen Sexton

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I heard about this collection last summer, in a context that will sound a little insufferable, i.e. at a poetry roundtable at an Irish Studies conference where we were discussing a fairly experimental work, but bear with me: someone brought up this collection as a poetry collection that, yes, was concerned with place, as so much poetry is, but one of those places was the digital world of Super Mario Bros. Well, that got my attention. But also I was tired AF from jet lag so […]

“our evening stories pushing back the brutal dark”

Hereafter: The Telling Life of Ellen O'Hara by Vona Groarke

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I hit burnout sometime around idk when last year, and while I kept on reading, I definitely stopped writing reviews. But now a new semester is staring me in the face, and I have a project I want to procrastinate on, so here’s a review, because I have been reading like a fiend these first two weeks of January, and this might be my favorite thing I’ve read so far this year (might sound like faint praise but I am 13 books deep already). I’ve […]

“To die like the skylark”

The Slain Birds by Michael Longley

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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 […]

Saying goodbye to a favorite poet

The Historians by Eavan Boland

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I first encountered Eavan Boland’s poetry during my junior year study-abroad in Scotland. I did a course on contemporary Scottish and Irish literature that was, quite frankly, pretty damn formative, and when we got to Eavan Boland, I was hooked. She wrote with such candor about the experience of being a woman, and a woman poet, and about being an Irish woman poet, and the struggles of finding her place in a tradition where women were almost always the subjects of poems, not the creators. […]



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