Valentine’s Day is just around the corner; that most vibrantly-hued demi-god of holidays that ensures a sugar rush and an inevitable bittersweet feeling of both overly-saccharin sentiment and sickeningly sticky bitterness. Row upon on row of discount treats in all their glorious vermillion cellophane will soon bombard the clearance isles and charm their way, if not to our hearts, then our eager bellies. All the confection of red and pink making you blue? Love comes in all packages my friends – with and without labels and bows.
The first month of the New Year is winding to a sleepy-eyed close; most folks have long since shook the Holiday hangover and found solace in the quiet lull following a freshly-minted year. But let us not grow bland as we settle into a comfortable grind! After a healthy Holiday hibernation, Sarabande Books’ 21c Reading Series is bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and ready to spice up your Monday nights once more. The 2012 series premiere starts tonight at 7:30pm, and poets H.L.
The hangover has been nursed; the Christmas Tree, once again, finds itself dormant in the basement; the last crumbs of your Auntie’s famous fudge have hardened into little, chocolate crystals at the bottom of the decorative tin. Take a big deep breath and slowly let it out. We have finally reached a long stretch of the mundane in the wake of all the Holiday hubbub. While some prefer to hit the ground running with all its loud proverbial bone-breaking, I would highly recommend you finish out the first week of the New Year with quality reflection – and some
Poetry is often relegated to the dustiest shelves and the farthest reaches of our thoughts; a genre most readers slogged through begrudgingly in high school and promptly dismissed on the other side of the diploma. Poetry is “stuffy” and “irrelevant”, perhaps even, dare I say it, “fussy”. But these stereotypes are true misnomers to the good name of The Poem, and deft poets, such as David Hernandez, easily vanquish such tarnishes. Hernandez’s latest collection of poems – published by Louisville’s own Sarabande Books &ndas
A trip to The Bookstore can sometimes be a daunting endeavor in that ever-elusive quest for the right read. Bibliophages thirsty for their next word-fix often crumble in the face of the thousand titles vying for their attention on the shelf. Which to choose? Which venture to risk?
The term “hysteria” can trace its rather curious roots back to the ancient Greeks. Often attributed to Hippocrates, “hysteria” began its journey to the modern English lexicon as a term used to describe the movements of a woman’s uterus as it flew about her body, causing disease and driving her wild. A fun fact. While it is now clear that the female womb remains stationary, the idea of the wild or “bad girl” still remains an alluring taboo in our society. Grabbing misbehavior by the horns, Louisville poet
Humans like things. It is no secret that our elevated Sapien race is a collective fan of objects – beautiful, valuable, interesting, unusual. Most of us boast a physical collection of some sort – jewelry, buttons, pens, posters, cats and things of other, and sometimes more peculiar, natures. But this desire to collect and own does not end with the tangible and the visible. We humans use our uniquely large and feeling brains to covet the insubstantial. We long to collect – we covet – the ideas and emotions and experiences of our
