Kei Lim

Talks with the Besieged: Documentary Poetry from Occupied Ukraine

August 21, 2025 Poetry, Translation

By ALEX AVERBUCH

Translated by OKSANA MAKSYMCHUK, MAX ROSOCHINSKY, and the author

Piece appears below in English and the original Russian and Ukrainian.

Translators’ Note

Alex Averbuch authored Talks with the Besieged on the basis of his engagement with group chats on Telegram and other public IM platforms by Ukrainian civilians in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory. The present selection is excerpted from this larger work that explores the relentless and evolving nature of the occupation, capturing the initial bewilderment and disorientation experienced by those who stayed behind. These brief, fragmented exchanges reflect civilians navigating the chaos of war in real time. Oscillating between found poetry, a digital archive, and virtual testimony, the text presents the fears, anxieties, aspirations, and dreams of the community enduring liminality and existential uncertainty. In translating these dispatches, we’ve attempted to approximate the casual, matter-of-fact tone of participants, their poignant attempts to lighten the mood, encourage each other, and offer reassurance and consolation.While Telegram and many other IM platforms offer automatic capitalization for each new comment, we decided to use lowercase letters instead, capitalizing only toponyms and proper names. We have also removed the names of the original contributors, blurring the distinctions between them and obscuring where one utterance ends and another begins. We hope that these decisions help render the text as a continuous uninterrupted expression of hope and terror and create an impression of a living chorus, a droning and wailing unbroken human voice.

What We’re Reading: July 2025

July 18, 2025 Reviews

Curated by KEI LIM

This July, ELIZABETH METZGER, NINA SEMCZUK, and SEÁN CARLSON bring you ruminations on what it feels like to return—to home, to memory, to oneself. As they make sense of their own lives through a poetry collection, novel, and essay collection, their recommendations invite us to contemplate what it means to exist within both change and stillness, and how time itself can wander and fragment.

Fanny Howe’s The Lyrics, recommended by Issue 24 Contributor Elizabeth Metzger

It’s early July, and I’m in the middle of moving back to the East Coast. Right now, a few days after the death of the poet Fanny Howe, I am reading her collection The Lyrics, on a screened porch in the late afternoon in the Berkshires, watching geese gather on a tiny red dock. I can hear the voices of parents across the pond teaching their children to fish, to let the fish go. I’m appreciating the element of air as I remember it from childhood, a sort of thickening all around me that feels wearable, welcoming, at times oppressive, a return to an old life from the other side.

Announcing The Common’s Sixth Literary Editorial Fellow

July 10, 2025 News and Events

(Amherst, Mass. July 10, 2025)—Award-winning, international literary journal The Common has announced Kei Lim ’25 as its sixth Literary Editorial Fellow. The fellowship launched in 2020 with support from the Whiting Foundation and is sustained by the generosity of Amherst College alumni donors.

The Literary Editorial Fellowship (LEF) was introduced with three goals in mind: to strengthen the bridge between The Common’s existing Literary Publishing Internship (LPI) for undergraduates and the professional publishing world; to provide real-world literary experience for an Amherst graduate, transferable to a wide range of fields; and to increase the capacity of The Common’s publishing and programming operations.

What We’re Reading: June 2025

June 20, 2025 Reviews

Curated by SAM SPRATFORD and KEI LIM

This month’s recommendations depart to new and old worlds, and explore what we can bring back from them. With CHRISTOPHER AYALA’s recommendation we find ourselves among magic and aliens alike, with CHRISTY TENDING’s we return to Mussolini-era Italy, and with MARIAH RIGG’s we are brought to a climate-ravaged future. Read on to traverse these collections of stories and essays.

Izumi Suzuki’s Hit Parade of Tears; recommended by TC Online Contributor Christopher Ayala

I’ve taken up the habit of hitting independent bookshops wherever I travel and buying the first interesting book I see, eschewing the never-judge-a-book-by-its-cover adage and one-hundred percent judging a book by its cover. Good design suggests to me a deeper, more thoughtful curation on behalf of the press, that a book itself is an art object whose cover is a deep and personal aesthetic representing the work of the writer and the work of the press. This is exactly how I found myself in Tucson Arizona’s Antigone Books, where I was led into Verso Books’ edition of Hit Parade of Tears by Izumi Suzuki, translated by Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, and Helen O’Horan.

Kaymoor, West Virginia

May 5, 2025 Issue 29, Issue 29 Poetry, Poetry

By G. C. WALDREP

According to rule. The terrible safeguard
of the text when placed against the granite
ledge into which our industry inscribed
itself. We were prying choice from the jaws
of poverty, from the laws of poverty.

Curlew Sixth Sense Bantry

May 5, 2025 Issue 29, Issue 29 Poetry, Poetry

By JOHN KINSELLA

To take a liberty with lexicon
is remiss in the circumstances
of the curlew
with diminished habitat.
It reprises every day,
and the mudflats
sheeted by the in-
sweep of tide leads it to the mowed
grass in front of the Bantry

Covanta Incinerator, Newark, New Jersey

May 5, 2025 Issue 29, Issue 29 Poetry, Poetry

By NICOLE COOLEY

Out my kitchen window, no pink corridor of smoke.

Along my daughters’ walk to school, redbud trees, native to this state, also known as flamethrowers.

Five miles away, in Newark, the sky above Raymond Boulevard blooms with the discard, the abandoned, rubbish—

No, those are not the right words.

Midweek

May 5, 2025 Fiction, Issue 29, Issue 29 Fiction

By BILL COTTER

“I knew this guy once, called Andre,” Gary said, striking a strike-anywhere match on the zipper of his fly. He lit a Salem and buried the match in a clay flowerpot at his end of his porch step. He looked at me, not for permission to continue, but as though he were inviting me to dare him not to.

“Andre,” I said, kind of liking the feel of the name on my teeth.

Tuesday

May 5, 2025 Fiction, Issue 29, Issue 29 Fiction

By LUCAS SCHAEFER

The morning after Ed Hooley saw a coyote in the supply closet, Bob Alexander declared something smelled rotten inside Terry Tucker’s Boxing Gym.

This was at six a.m. on a Tuesday, midway through abs and stretching. Inside the ring, the eleven members of the First Thing crew sprawled out on foam mats as Terry Tucker, fifty-four, led them through an arduous medley of scissor kicks and side-to-sides, knees-to-your-ears and upside-down bicycle. It was August in Austin, the average age inside the ring was forty-nine, and though it would be hours before a single speck of perspiration would appear on Terry’s left temple, his charges were sopping.

Aqueduct

May 5, 2025 Issue 29, Issue 29 Poetry, Poetry

By MARY JO SALTER

All the other professors emeriti
have shuffled in, neat in jacket and tie
except for the few ladies (flats and hose),
and nobody’s not in hearing aids—both those
with hair to hide the wires and those without,
and (a sub-category) those who shout
their greetings now while sporting a severe
kind of stopper, jammed into the ear
as if to bar the spillage of what remains
(old wine in old bottles) of their brains.

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Kei Lim

Kei Lim

Talks with the Besieged: Documentary Poetry from Occupied Ukraine

What We’re Reading: July 2025

Announcing The Common’s Sixth Literary Editorial Fellow

What We’re Reading: June 2025

Kaymoor, West Virginia

Curlew Sixth Sense Bantry

Covanta Incinerator, Newark, New Jersey

Midweek

Tuesday

Aqueduct

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