Loads to do as usual at the Community Bookstore on Seventh Avenue between Garfield and Carroll.

On Tuesday, May 19th at 7pm

Philip Fried reads poetry from Cohort

Cohort, with
its three-poem introduction and book-length sonnet sequence, draws inspiration
from the sonnet’s origins to update it for the Digital Age. Linked from its
earliest days with legal proceedings and a modern psychology of conflicted
love, the sonnet held together what wanted to fly apart. Petrarch miniaturized
the standoff of forces in the oxymorons he used to characterize his divided
emotions—sick health and freezing fire. Acknowledging this tradition of warring
but tightly bound forces, Fried re-conceives the contemporary sonnet as an
arena where fragments of self and samples of lingo play off against one
another. And coloring these contests is a love intrigue that implicates the
reader.

On Wednesday, May 20th at 7:30 pm

The Nonfiction Book Group discusses Nicholas Doidge's The Brain that Changes Itself

For our next
book, the Nonfiction Book Club will turn from nature around us to nature within
us, as we read Norman Doidge’s The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of
Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science.

Like Oliver Sacks and Stephen Jay Gould, Doidge is the rare writer who
is both adept at explaining science and entertaining in the process. Join us as
we explore the concept of neuroplasticity — the concept that the brain can
change itself according to need and that, far from having a single human
nature, we are in fact extremely malleable. As Globe & Mail puts it, “You
don't have to be a brain surgeon to read it — just a person with a curious
mind.”

And next week:

–Tuesday, May 26th at 7pm: An evening of poetry with GC Waldrep and Jennifer Kronovet

–Wednesday, May 27th at 7:30pm: Modernist Book Group discusses Nancy Mitford's Love in a Cold Climate