Things are good but the writing style could've been better for more engaging way for reading. Okay kind of book for me.

First off, this cover is beautifully simple. It's a book of poetry that I found simple, symmetrical, and yet, jagged with raw emotion. Banks doesn't just talk about his experiences as a child or love and loss; his poems are the heart of humanity and everything that touched our lives, including politics, strangers, the news....everything. His poetry expresses the underlying connection between ourselves and the world we exist in and I loved this perspective.
It's beautiful, poignant, sad, and yet, satisfying. Reflective and thoughtful.

Note: Didn't get to read the whole book.

This book makes you aware of so many things in your life - of certain fears and opinions that never surfaced before, of a spark of happiness that comes with something you didn't know you adored so much, of the feelings, expectations, vibes, conflict, just everything around you - it makes you aware of everything.

Filled to the brink with nostalgia.

You don't need to be born in the 80s/90s to understand where the writer is coming from - you just need to have a fear of what the future might bring as everyone always has. This is a book about what feels to be human in this century, suddenly losing the sense of yourself and the world you live in with every new creation that is born replacing all the old familiar things with the terrifying tarnish of "new".

References - omg from food to music to poetry, politics, history and everyday life - this book is a dumpster filled with amazing references. Poetry about Poetry - you hardly find that in a book, so wonderful, honest and supportive of the art.

Thoroughly enjoyed everything I read.

At what point do we give up and surrender to our desires, even if they end up killing us.



The Cloud Versus Grand Unification Theory: Poems by Chris Banks is the poet's fourth full collection of poetry. Banks received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Guelph, before moving on to complete a Masters of Arts in Creative Writing from Concordia University and later a Bachelor of Education from the University of Western Ontario. His first full-length collection, Bonfires, was awarded the Jack Chalmers Award for poetry by the Canadian Authors' Association in 2004. Bonfires was also a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award for best first book of poetry in Canada.

I found The Cloud Versus Grand Unification Theory a pleasing and nostalgic collection of poetry. Banks by his references is a few years younger than I am but where our historical and cultural references cross brings back a multitude of memories. For Banks, it's the disappearance of arcades and for me the loss of red brick roads. We recall music on tape, particular mix tapes that allowed us to disappear into the music for a while rewinding back to a moment and listening to it over and over again. Today "kids" dive into the stream of music. We slipped so deeply into the electronic age that Banks wants a reboot. Gone is the day of getting our music information from Rolling Stone magazine. In a dusty corner somewhere is our old denim or leather vest filled with band patches and safety pins. We shared the scout meetings in church basements and eight track tapes. We now live in a world controlled by smartphones and leveled out by Big Pharma. Now that we are old enough, we long for the days of our youth. We, like Banks, reflect on the good memories and conveniently forget about the air pollution, leaded gas, phosphate detergents, and Pol Pot.

The other side of The Cloud Versus Grand Unification Theory is linked to science, history, and literature. The science is good varying from chemistry to quantum mechanics. A particularly good literary pairing was "Wordsworth Versus the Cloud." The poet seamlessly plays on "Tintern Abbey" in a modern retelling the poem; It was my favorite in the collection. In history, Banks mentions the success of the Roman armies. Their superiority was in the infrastructure they built not in their proficiency in killing. There is also the sad story of Martha at the Cincinnati Zoo.

We live in a world that is much different than the world we grew up in. And complicating that change is a world we did not expect. We live in a world where "natural flavour trumps nature every time." It is a world that does not seem genuine -- "Authenticity requires time most people would rather spend at Walmart." Banks writes a collection well connected to very late Boomers and early Gen Xers. We lived in a time when we thought things would keep getting better and we would not get older. Sometimes we forget those days; Banks reminds us of them.



Available September 5, 2017 from ECW Press

Poetry is a category of writing that bored me as a student (high school does a great job of sucking all of the life out of reading). But now I have decided to give poetry another go. I started with classics (Rumi, of course), and something very traditional (Mary Oliver).

Then I saw The Cloud Versus Grand Unification Theory available of NetGalley, and decided that it sounded intriguing, so I put in a request.

The poems in this book were interesting. Very definitely free verse, with no rhyming, or even the sort of formatting I would have expected. And yet, the poems resonated with me. There was a lot of focus on the modern world, and technology, and a sort of whitful look backwards.

If there was anything negative about the collection, it was that there is little emotional variation. Pretty much every poem left me somewhere between melancholy and depression. In general this is not necessarily a bad thing, but it made it difficult to read more than a handful of poems at a time. I know that poets aren't going to take orders, but still, the occasional poem that was more upbeat would have helped the reader.

Did I enjoy the book? Yes. Am I going to rush out to find the author's other collections? Maybe not.

I found that these poems were not to my liking. Poetry is very subjective, and I'm sure there is an audience for this, but these were not for me. Half of them were prose poems and the other half seemed like stream of consciousness rambling. Nothing, to me, felt profound. I did not find that these poems played with language in a unique or clever way, so I was left disappointed.

A collection of prose poetry that speaks to the contemporary moment, full of nostalgia for older technology and questioning the place of the soul in the rapid-fire world of now. Gorgeous, smart, thoughtful writing. Highly recommended.

Truly lovely collection. As I was reading, some of the poems felt like nostalgic elegies, or elegies for nostalgia (nostalegies?), it's hard to pinpoint. You can sense Banks striving to cope with the loss of things that feel elemental to a person even if they might seem trivial to the arc of history (arcades! modems! "intricately folded high-school notes, written in cursive in April of 1986"!), particularly in the wake of the tsunami that is modern technology and how it can drive disconnection even as it claims to fuel connection.
Raw and real and beautiful for poetry lovers (with plenty of references to poetry classics, and even a poem about the struggle between lyric and narrative forms), the poems should be accessible even to people who don't typically read poetry, they feel more like meditative paragraphs and soliloquies on relatable experiences and things, not metaphors trapped inside a rhyme scheme. 4 - 4.5 stars.

Not my kind of poetry, but someone out there will love it.