“Let the beauty
we love be what
we do”: Celebrating
Libra Writers
September 28, 2021
︎︎︎A Good Used Book
Libras are leaders, critics, and beauty-questers. Their symbol, the scale, has been constantly employed in both life and literature: weighing fantasy and fact, connection and calamity. They are ruled by romantic Venus and blown by all the winds of the world. They are Ursula K. Le Guin and bell hooks, Ta-Nehisi Coates and T.S. Eliot, Arthur Rimbaud and Anne Rice.
With curls as luxurious as their epic poetry, they were born in Ancient Rome in 70 BC. They were writing, in Virgil’s case, such masterworks as the Aeneid and Eclogues - balancing such forces as heaven and hell.
Since then, Libras have taken many shapes for many centuries: from Rumi in 1207 to Roxane Gay in 1974. They invented the modern novel, in the case of Miguel de Cervantes, and pageantry, in the case of Oscar Wilde. They have been both the mediator and the muse of the zodiac, writing some of their most powerful poetry as Amiri Baraka in 1960’s Harlem.
They can, as F. Scott Fitzgerald said best, “hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” They can move from Ho Chi Minh City to Hartford, Connecticut as refugees and, 30 years later, write a book as real and as aching as On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. They can hold both pen and gavel - strike any fleeting truth.
With curls as luxurious as their epic poetry, they were born in Ancient Rome in 70 BC. They were writing, in Virgil’s case, such masterworks as the Aeneid and Eclogues - balancing such forces as heaven and hell.
Since then, Libras have taken many shapes for many centuries: from Rumi in 1207 to Roxane Gay in 1974. They invented the modern novel, in the case of Miguel de Cervantes, and pageantry, in the case of Oscar Wilde. They have been both the mediator and the muse of the zodiac, writing some of their most powerful poetry as Amiri Baraka in 1960’s Harlem.
They can, as F. Scott Fitzgerald said best, “hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” They can move from Ho Chi Minh City to Hartford, Connecticut as refugees and, 30 years later, write a book as real and as aching as On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. They can hold both pen and gavel - strike any fleeting truth.
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