A Good Girl in the People’s Republic

LEI HU
When she stepped outside and closed the door, the iron handle was so cold, it felt like it was burning. With the basket on her arm, Fu Rong slipped her hands into a pair of cotton mittens her mother had made. She knew she would warm up once she started walking.

Summer People

BETH BOYLE MACHLAN
I wanted so badly to see that house, those dunes, the cold, deep water as our natural habitat instead of what I always kind of knew it was: a brief, bright accident of place and time and money, one that left me imprinted for life on a species to which I didn’t belong.

picture of a bible opened up

February 2024 Poetry Feature

CORTNEY LAMAR CHARLESTON
There was tear gas deployed without a tear. There were / rubber bullets fired from weapons that also fire lethal rounds. There were / armored vehicles steering through the streets of the capital that stars our maps. // What we saw was only new to the people it was new to.

Headshot of Rushi Vyas

Reaching a Pulse Point: Melody Nixon Interviews Rushi Vyas

MELODY NIXON interviews RUSHI VYAS
Growing up in the suburban US, as a brown person in white suburbia, we are taught to make grief palatable. Expressions of sorrow are permitted, so long as we "move on" or "move forward." There is the assumption that, no matter who it is that died or how they lived, once they are gone we are to only "remember the good times."

Chair against the window

Susan

SARAH DUNPHY-LELII
I visit with a friend as she works to empty her mother’s house, who died just days before Christmas, and each object holds a tiny piece of Susan. I come away with several treasures lovely (a hand knitted scarf, a clay donkey to hold my garlic) and practical.

Cover of "The Legible Element" by Ralph Sneeden picturing a shoreline.

Through the Lens of the Littoral: A Review of Ralph Sneeden’s The Legible Element

Review by MATT W. MILLER
Sneeden, whether talking waves or poetry, is never pedantic, never flexing knowledge about water or literature. He’s just excited to make connections between ideas, fully and puckishly aware of his geeky literariness, acknowledging that “Nothing, I am told, is more boring than when I do start talking about the waves.”

Using The Common in my first-year seminars has been fun, fruitful, and helpfully startling for these classes.”

—Martha Cooley, Associate Professor of English, Adelphi University Receive classroom subscription discounts, lesson plans, and more when you TEACH THE COMMON »

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