Eliza Brewer

Poems From The Life Assignment

September 8, 2020 Poetry

Join us as we celebrate The Common contributor, Ricardo Maldonado’s, Pub Day with poems in both English and Spanish from his debut book of poetry, The Life Assignment.

I Give You My Heart

I find myself on my feet with fifteen leaves.
Everything carries its own light on the walls.

I woke up to slaughter, my heart opening
to cemeteries of moon—

the parasites, the drizzle. The mud crowning
the undergrowth with immense sadness.

I knew death when I dressed
in my uniform.

I found the index of solitude: my country
in its legal jargon, its piety, its fiction—

Yes. It loves me, really.

I give my blood as the blood of all fish.

Opłatek

August 26, 2020 Dispatches

By JANNETT MATUSIAK

Denver, Colorado

At the second hospital in as many days, my father starts seeing crows. He points at the nurses’ station with his chin, speaks in perfect Polish, the kind I haven’t heard him speak in decades. His brain lights up momentarily with the speed and language of the young man he was when he first came to America, before Multiple Sclerosis and age started robbing his body. My father tells me to look, look, look. Tells me the roof is so thin, that the small one is looking for its nest. I can tell by his eyes he really sees it. He’s hallucinating, I say. I’m startled, then startled a second time when the nurse and doctor don’t think much of it. They tell me it’s ICU psychosis, the lack of sleep and all the beeping.

Reading Black Voices: TC Staff Picks IV

August 17, 2020 Reviews

This is the fourth in a series of features highlighting the Black writers our editors and staff have been reading. To read The Common’s statement in support of the nationwide protests against anti-Black racism, white supremacy, and police brutality, click here.

Recommendations: Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir by Natasha Trethewey, The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett, This is Major: Notes on Diana Ross, Dark Girls, and Being Dope by Shayla Lawson

Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir by Natasha Trethewey

Recommended by W. Ralph Eubanks, Contributing Editor

The first chapter of Natasha Trethewey’s memoir Memorial Drive is called “Another Country,” a title that mirrors James Baldwin’s novel of Black alienation of the same name. Baldwin’s other country was Greenwich Village, while Trethewey’s is Mississippi. While these two places could not be more different, the feeling of isolation elicited by both is the same.

Anzhelina Polonskaya: Russian Poetry in Translation

August 13, 2020 Poetry, Translation, Uncategorized

Poems by ANZHELINA POLONSKAYA
Translated from the Russian by ANDREW WACHTEL

Translator’s note:

Recreating the poetry of Anzhelina Polonskaya in English is tricky because her favorite poetic trope is ellipsis, which is easier to achieve in Russian. Russian, as an inflected language (like Latin), can place words in pretty much any order within a sentence, and the poet can use case endings to indicate the relationship of nouns to each other and adjectives to nouns. When something is left out of a sentence, the empty space can be filled in by the reader. Thus, a Russian poem, at least grammatically speaking, looks like a Lego construction, from which many blocks can be removed without destroying the structure. By contrast, English translations in our (almost) non-inflected language are more like houses of cards – and when you try to remove pieces of the grammatical structure the whole thing tends to fall down.

Reading Black Voices: TC Staff Picks III

July 27, 2020 Reviews

This is the third in a series of features highlighting the Black writers our editors and staff have been reading. To read The Common’s statement in support of the nationwide protests against anti-Black racism, white supremacy, and police brutality, click here.

Recommendations: Newcomer Can’t Swim by Renee Gladman, The Book of Delights by Ross Gay, White Girls by Hilton Als

Newcomer Can’t Swim by Renee Gladman

Recommended by Elizabeth Witte, Associate Editor

Renee Gladman’s Newcomer Can’t Swim is a sort of linguo-geographical exploration of place (cityscape, restaurant, beach, etc.,) and of the characters, the voices that populate these places, that move through, and act or are acted upon within each scene.

Eliza Brewer

elizabrewer

Poems From The Life Assignment

Opłatek

Reading Black Voices: TC Staff Picks IV

Anzhelina Polonskaya: Russian Poetry in Translation

Reading Black Voices: TC Staff Picks III

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