272. Read. Look. Drink.

We’re voracious consumers of culture. And each week, a member of our team shares the words, images, and beers that inspired them.

Read.// A certain doomed TV soccer team got a lot of our attention this year, but long before the Yellowjackets terrorized us (and each other), there was Ada Limón’s poem, “Cannibal Woman.” Published in her collection “The Carrying,” which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, this poem reflects on a myth about a fearsome giantess, “a woman who was like weather, as enormous as a storm.” Limón just began her second term as the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States, so now is a great time to check out her “Cannibal Woman,” a gentler, more lyrical take on bloodthirstiness.

Look.// This isn’t your mother’s Josh Groban. Sure, he’s still velvet-voiced, but as the title character in Thomas Kail’s Broadway revival of “Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street”, the velvet is now dripping blood—or “precious rubies,” one of the musical’s many euphemisms for gore. Watch Josh sing to his murder weapon of choice (a razor blade, of course) and kick up his heels in a show-stopping number about the pleasures (and profits) of cannibalism. Even if you always made your parents eject Josh Groban CDs when you got into the car, you’ve got to admit seeing him so unhinged is a blast. And man, can he sing!

Drink.// Aeronaut Brewing’s Lemon Cherry Berry Hard Seltzer

As a kid, I was staunchly in the blue raspberry camp when it came to ice pops, bubble gum flavors, and Kool-Aid® packets. Something about cherry’s lurid red was unappealing to a child with an overactive imagination, like me. These days, your typical brewery isn’t offering Blue Razz on tap, but if you’re lucky you might find something good in the fruit family. Enter: Aeronaut Brewing’s Lemon Cherry Berry Hard Seltzer. Not scarlet so much as dark pink, this drink still goes down easy and could have you rethinking all those years you passed up cherry red for neon blue.

Words by Alyson Mosquera Dutemple