Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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. […]

“And if I speak of Paradise”

A Portable Paradise by Roger Robinson

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A Portable Paradise, Roger Robinson’s fourth poetry collection, didn’t come across my radar until it won the 2019 T. S. Eliot Prize for poetry. While literary prize culture is as fallible as, say, film awards like the Oscars, the TSE Prize shortlist is always interesting to look at, and the title poem immediately caught my interest. Unfortunately, it was incredibly hard to get my hands on a copy! Robinson’s publisher, Peepal Tree Press, is a small independent press, and it seems like demand for the […]

“Mama always knew the wrong thing to say.”

Beauty Mark: a Verse Novel of Marilyn Monroe by Carole Boston Weatherford

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In this slim volume, Weatherford imagines a memoir written by Monroe, chronicling her life from her tumultuous childhood in foster care to her troubled final days in her L.A. home.  It includes both personal, introspective pieces about Monroe’s internal struggles as well as pieces that catalog her film career and persona, and the public response to it. I devour any biographical media of Monroe’s as she is my number one icon. As a teen, I stole a poster of her from a neighboring school’s production […]

CBR13 #2: A Book of Luminous Things – Edited by Czesław Miłosz

A Book of Luminous Things by Czesław Miłosz

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I don’t think I’ve read a poetry anthology since college — and even then, I mostly just read the poems we were studying and ignored both the commentary and all the other poems. A Norton Anthology of Poetry can be a very intimidating book, after all. I didn’t actually intend to read one this time, either. However, I happened to come across a poem by Eastern European poet Czesław Miłosz which I liked, and when I googled him I discovered he’d edited this anthology. I figured […]

Hwæt? Bro!

Beowulf: A New Translation by Maria Dahvana Headley

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I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m not much one for reading poetry. I don’t know if I have some sort of mental tone-deafness or some other strange issue, but I can never get the cadence and tone right in my head. It has to be read aloud. Now while this is something that I can do myself, I prefer having poetry read to me. This was something Maria Dahvana Headley had in mind when she was working on a more contemporary translation of […]

I guess I just don’t get the “narrative in verse” sensibility.

SHOUT by Laurie Halse Anderson

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This three (and a half) star rating is entirely personal preference. I just would prefer that this book was in prose instead of verse. I would nearly always prefer a work be in verse if it is possible. Obviously if your aim is to write poems, individually crafted ones with like, a poetic aim or whatever (I have no idea why poets do what they do) that’s not gonna work. But here, this is a memoir, and while there were several “poems” that worked as […]



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