Kei Lim

Kaleidoscope of the Heart: A Review of Joseph Bathanti’s The Act of Contrition

By JOSEPH BATHANTI
Reviewed by STEPHEN HUNDLEY

The Act of Contrition book cover

Omega Street. Malocchio. Napolitano and Calabrese. Fritz, Frederico, and Fred. In The Act of Contrition, a collection of linked stories and one novella, Joseph Bathanti reconstructs the mid-twentieth century in the East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburgh. The Act of Contrition arrives on the heels of Bathanti’s 2022 book of poetry, Light at the Seam, and revisits characters introduced in the author’s 2007 story collection, The High Heart.  Bathanti represents East Liberty as a kaleidoscopic dome of terms, places, and names that become familiar to readers, transporting—even trapping—them in a world that is sharp, hostile, and yet, manages to feel like home. Even as readers feel themselves fixed under the pressures of place, they cannot help but be, in equal parts, enchanted by the specificity of Bathanti’s prose. For example, take these lines, from “The Malocchio,” which wed the romance of embodied perspective to the frank realism of the quotidian archive:

“…nothing but brick piles and twisted metal peeked above the mud lots hacked with maudlin footprints and toppled clotheslines—trampled dresses and diapers yet clinging to them. Jackhammers still throttled. The stench of gasoline cloaked the ether—and in the distance, from Penn Avenue, rose the heavenly aroma of Nabisco’s ovens.”

Kaleidoscope of the Heart: A Review of Joseph Bathanti’s The Act of Contrition
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More to the Story

By MICHAEL DAVID LUKAS

My Grandma Betty’s garage, like the rest of her house, was always neat and well-labeled. The tools hung in their places. The floor was swept clean. Along the walls, DIY wood shelving was stacked high with boxes labeled according to their contents. Herb Toys. Xmas Decorations.

Somewhere amidst all the old slot cars and yearbooks, up by the rafters in a far corner, were three produce boxes filled with ephemera from her childhood in Toledo: a trophy from the Maumee River Yacht Club, a 1911 desk calendar printed by her adoptive father’s plumbing and heating company—“We’d like to be your plumbers just the same as Dr. Jones or Dr. Brown is your doctor”—get-well cards, bank books, newspaper clippings.

More to the Story
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Real Estate for the Blended Family (or What I Learned from Zillow)

By ELIZABETH HAZEN

 

The houses are photographed with light in mind:
The sun, they say, is shining here. The filter 

hints at lemons: fresh laundry on a quaint
old line. The “den” becomes the “family room” 

where we’d play rummy and watch TV, the square
footage enough to hold all of our misgivings.

Real Estate for the Blended Family (or What I Learned from Zillow)
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A Day Revisited

By ROBERT CORDING 

I’m standing in the exact spot
of this photograph, looking at the past—
my middle son, still alive, lying on the rug
at my feet in my oldest son’s house.
On his wide chest, his niece, weeks old,
sleeps, adrift perhaps in the familiarity
of the heart’s steady beat, her memory
of him formed mostly by this photograph.

A Day Revisited
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Prelude

By KWAME OPOKU-DUKU

Was it all simply adornment,
watching the rain fall from the sun, 
or the mourning dove that carried
the wallet-sized photo in its beak?
Looking back, it was true—
I had stopped seeing the beauty in it all,
living from moment to moment, 
looking to be granted some small sense 
of pleasure, as if by respite or charity.

Prelude
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Tramsa, Tromsa, Tramso

By MÒNICA BATET
Translated by MARIALENA CARR and JULIA SANCHES

Sometimes this is my story, others it’s not. They used to bring it up at home whenever the room fell silent. They’d talk about her, about a city with a strange name, Sokołowsko. They’d talk about that evening.

There are still pages and pages with tracings of her hands sitting in a drawer. Some are just of hands, while others have words written on the palms or along the fingers. Run away, Get out, Air air, Disappear…. Now and then I place my hand in one of the outlines to see if we have this one thing in common. If, maybe, I too will see all those people someday.

Tramsa, Tromsa, Tramso
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Memories of the Rise and Fall of VICE China, 2015-2022

By RUONAN ZHENG

This piece is part of a special portfolio featuring new and queer voices from China. Read more from the portfolio here.


1. May 2021

At an assignment in Xinjiang, I am covering a rising female photographer, club-hopping with her and her boyfriend. Amidst glittering disco balls, fast drum beats, and fake US dollars tossed around by a random rapper, I am introduced to a guy who used to work for Vice China, making short documentaries. His exact greeting was: “Send my best regards to the bosses; I too graduated from there.” We exchanged our WeChats, and he pulled off some crazy dance moves on the floor afterward. I didn’t hear from him again but have enjoyed the hikes and mountain scenery posted on his WeChat Moments ever since.

“Graduated” is a word many ex-employees of Vice China use to describe their experience after leaving the company. Our time there felt as if we were a bunch of undergrads taking wacky tequila shots in the office, then still coming in hungover the next morning because there was nowhere better to go. Near the end of Vice China’s existence, Simon, one of the OGs who had worked for them since the beginning, reminisced about an end-of-the-year company cruise party, recalling those times as a dream. Back then, he did a little bit of everything—editorial, commercial, social media. There was always stuff to do, partnerships to form, and, of course, money from advertisers to spend. All the alcohol we ingested and the battles we fought with clients were preparing us for life after, in the cruel outside world.

The allure of working at Vice was very real for a twenty-something, especially for a Chinese kid. The Western influence took root and prospered at Vice China, which opposed everything a normal job in China entailed. To be recruited meant becoming part of a cool-kid club, access to a social currency, a guaranteed adventurous time.

Memories of the Rise and Fall of VICE China, 2015-2022
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Missile Sequence

By MOHAMMAD IBRAHIM NAWAYA

Translated by KATHARINE HALLS

 

Piece appears below in English and the original Arabic.

 

Missile One

A straw basket hangs from the side of a vehicle parked at the corner of your street. You assume it’s displaying fresh parsley, or strawberries, and you approach the man you assume is the vendor. His eyes repel you like blazing heat as he trains his Kalashnikov on you; you falter, want to explain why you have come toward him, you look at the basket and are stunned to see that it contains RPG missiles, arrayed with delightful geometry, and now you need to apologise to him for your inquisitive staring otherwise he’s going to empty that rifle into your head. But it’s pointless attempting to do anything because you’re rooted to the spot, which is what always happens when you’re scared, so you take hold of your eyes with your hands and scrape out the pupils with your thumbs, then hand them to him with an I’m sorry, because it’s the pupils specifically that have got you tangled up with him. He looks at you and swiftly loads his launcher ready to fire it at you. You dodge right and left, crashing into the walls around you, you duck into buildings one after another, and then you find yourself in your own quiet home, your wife beside you laying the lunch, and there in the centre of the magnificent dish of rice is a home-cooked RPG grenade.

Missile Sequence
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Podcast: Maria de Caldas Antão on ”My Freedom”

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Listen on Apple Podcasts.

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Listen on Spotify.

Transcript: Maria de Caldas Antão

Maria de Caldas Antão speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her poem “My Freedom,” which appears in The Common’s most recent issue. Maria talks about how a casual comment inspired this poem, which explores the idea of freedom, and what it might mean to be free: personally, politically, physically, philosophically. Maria also discusses how she hears a sort of music when writing new poetry, and then chooses words, sounds, rhythms, and line breaks to put that musicality on the page.

image of the author and issue cover

Podcast: Maria de Caldas Antão on ”My Freedom”
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August 2024 Poetry Feature: New Poems By Our Contributors

New Poems by Our Contributors NICOLE COOLEY, DUY ĐOÀN, and JOHN KINSELLA.

 

Table of Contents:

  • Nicole Cooley, “Covanta, A Detail”
  • Duy Đoàn, “Norepinephrine — “Suicides in Fiction Say Goodbye”
  • John Kinsella, “Before Eurydice Was Bitten”

 

Covanta, A Detail
By Nicole Cooley

The incinerator smoke an incision in the sky.
My daughter no longer small yet still I want to swallow her back into my body.
Sky a scalding.
My daughter asks me to stop saying, I wish this wasn’t the world you have to live in.
In my dream my girl is the size of a thumb I catch between my teeth.
Sky all smoke.
In the morning, men wearing masks drag our cans out to their truck.
In the morning, out the kitchen window, I wish the wide street rivered.

August 2024 Poetry Feature: New Poems By Our Contributors
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