Classic Cocktails: Liquid Love Poems

About the Book

Genevieve, a poet, and Sean, a bartender, wrote this literary affair between classic cocktails and love poems—an adventure into the romance and libertine spirit of classic cocktails, including fabulous recipes from the 1920’s with modern variations. Hemingway’s advice to “write drunk and edit sober” describes their creative process as poems were written under the spirit of each drink.

The cocktails provide the metaphors for a poetic love story, giving the history, secrets, and mystique of each drink. What started as a single poem, using the martini as a metaphor for love and life, grew into a merger of many classic cocktails with the developing romance. Key social issues of the times were also swept along with it as the poems invite the reader along on their journey.

Classic Cocktails: Liquid Love Poems is a tribute to the slower styles of earlier times, linking classic cocktails with important issues such as liberty, freedom of choice, love between men and women as equals, and honoring previous generations—for whom everyone should be grateful to as part of the evolution of the human species. These issues are still present in modern culture, and now more than ever people need poetry, romance, and spirituality in their lives.

With the quick pace of life and dependence on technology to communicate, people need to slow down and take time to get in touch with their natural selves; who we were before the social conditioning around survival, money, and materialism cemented people into false identities or stereotypical roles. Everyone needs time to just be—to reconnect with one’s spirit and allow creative urges and inspirations to express themselves freely.

This reconnection can truly be a spiritual journey to not only connect with our selves, but also with each other. Hemingway has a lot to say about this in the last poem, The Liberty Bell.

About the Author

Genevieve Sourile is a Chicagoan and an Australian. She has been educated by life and holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and Drama from Eastern Illinois University, and a PhD from the University of Queensland focusing on the erasure of women playwrights. She has lectured on these topics at length.

Genevieve’s docudrama The Body Politic and poetry book A Change of Heart address healing after a trauma. She currently works as an acupuncturist, and is writing a novel on spirituality, reincarnation, near-death experiences, and healing after violence.