Morry Ajao

2025 was a momentous year for The Common: our fifteenth anniversary, our 30th issue, even a major motion picture based on a story in the magazine. We’re more grateful than ever for our readers, contributors, donors, and friends.

Before we close out this busy year of publishing, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on the unique, resonant, and transporting pieces that made 2025 memorable. The Common published 269 contributors this year. Below, you can browse a list of the ten most-read new pieces of 2025 to get a taste of what left an impact on readers.

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Candy and Layer Cake: Zack Strait in Conversation with Richard Siken (and Five Poems)

“The whole world seemed like a five-paragraph essay but poetry rubbed against that. It was contrary and rebellious. That summer it rained a lot, and hard. We had a 100-year flood. It washed out bridges. I saw a house on the edge of a swollen wash lose its backyard and then get swept away. I didn’t want to talk about it, I wanted to make somebody feel it. I started writing every day. I was very bad at it. ”

—Richard Siken

Northern Spaces, Idiosyncratic Characters & the Beguiling Icelandic Landscape: an interview with Nathaniel Ian Miller

December 8, 2025 Interviews

Jenna Grace Sciuto (left) and Nathaniel Ian Miller (right)

NATHANIEL IAN MILLER has always been intrigued by northern spaces, a link that connects his acclaimed first novel, The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven, to his latest work, Red Dog Farm. Red Dog Farm is a wonderfully engaging coming-of-age tale about a young Icelander named Orri and his relationships with family, friends, and the farm where he was raised. Miller’s ability to write characters—whether human or animal—that are, in his words, “emphatically (and believably) themselves,” is a unique strength. JENNA GRACE SCIUTO discussed the book with Miller, touching on what writing about northern spaces enables in his novels, his influences (Icelandic and more broadly), and the versions of himself that have gone into this story.

Dispatches from Søgne, Ditmas Park, and Temple

December 3, 2025 Dispatches

By JULIA TOLO

Søgne, Norway, July 8, 2018

Sitting around the white painted wood and metal table
that hosted the best dinners of my childhood
my uncle is sharing
his many theories of the world
the complexities of his thoughts are
reserved for Norwegian, with some words here and there
to keep his English-speaking audience engaged

I don’t translate, don’t want to
repeat those thoughts
in any language

but we have a nice time
there’s a cheesecake with macerated peaches
and mint

the sun is low and through the window to my grandma’s house
the heavy lace curtains are catching the light

Yellowed Pages from the Front

November 18, 2025 Fiction

By ALEXANDRA LYTTON REGALADO

Excerpted from Drownproofing and Other Stories, a finalist for the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing 2025.

Dr. Rafael Améndarez
San Francisco, California, United States of America

July 14, 1968

Srita. Liliam Améndarez
San Salvador, El Salvador, Central America

Greetings my always dear cousin, Lili!

Last week I was discharged from the hospital, and considering my life’s current hustle and bustle, just in case, I’ve decided to congratulate you in advance for your birthday. Congratulations a thousand times on that auspicious August 9.
A few days ago, by accident, I came across a letter among old and musty papers. One of those things one keeps without knowing why. Things that are stored away after reading them and are not read again until that day when unexpectedly, by chance, they appear in our hands. Imagine a letter written a whopping two decades ago! Yellowed by the years. A letter from a friend. This one dates back to World War II.

At that time, I was in France with the American army. I remember it was a freezing day, bitterly cold, in January 1944. There in the French Vosges, between Colmar and Strasbourg. That winter I remember vividly because it was extremely harsh. A man could be wounded and freeze within minutes. Climbing a mountain loaded with winter clothing, weapons, and ammunition, one would sweat, and that sweat running down the face, sliding, in a moment when one stopped to catch their breath, froze into ice splinters, which could be peeled off.

Read Excerpts by Finalists for the Restless Books Kellman Prize for Immigrant Literature 2025

November 18, 2025 News and Events

This year, 2025, marks the tenth anniversary of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, which supports immigrant writers whose work examines how immigration shapes our lives, our communities, and our world. In honor of the anniversary, Restless Books’ unstintingly generous board member, Steven G. Kellman—whose grandparents were immigrants to the United States—has endowed the prize so that it may continue in perpetuity. As ICE and federal agents invade our cities, we hope the newly named Kellman Prize for Immigrant Literature can serve as a reminder that immigrants’ voices deserve to be heard. Anyone familiar with history knows that immigrants have always been the gravitational center of the extraordinary American experiment.

Of course, freedom is not only under siege in America, but all across the globe. As autocrats deny the rights of people in Palestine, in Sudan, in Ukraine to remain on their own land, forced displacement is happening everywhere.

The 2025 Kellman Prize for Immigrant Literature was judged by Dinaw Mengestu, Rajiv Mohabir, and Ilan Stavans; the winner will be announced by LitHub on December 2. Please join us in celebrating the work of the following four finalists, and in holding up the power of immigrant stories to remind us of our common humanity. No one is free until all of us are free.

— Restless Books

Anna Malihon: Poems from Ukraine

October 27, 2025 Issue 30, Issue 30 Poetry, Poetry, Translation, Ukraine Portfolio

By ANNA MALIHON
Translated by OLENA JENNINGS

YLANG-YLANG

in the thick halo of insects, the lamp resembles
a mature dandelion
the girl as pale as bandages incessantly conjures spells
I can’t make out the words
I am still there where there is roaring and how…
…ling
unbridled nature has undone me thoroughly
I lay like a stunned fish in the lord’s hand
and a thought about water fills a warm sea
bordering the land’s illuminated wounds
that the worms, animals and feathered messengers
visited while searching for sustenance
and instead of my arm a bamboo shoot hangs out
gathering strength
and in my hand someone has placed
the globe of this complicated world
exhaling: live
I don’t have enough strength to close my eyes in shame
or scream get away from me, I’m alone
alone I’m alone, give me back my hand
how now to overcome the grand piano’s mouth of silence
and toss a baby up to the sun
the bamboo will only be good for a flute
but I lack enough breath even for that
a tall girl with a gaze like the Mother of God
murmurs seeds of words upon the tiles
the mocking moon peeks through a hole burnt
in the tulle: time to go
and now in the cottony silence, a yellow
melody of resurrection pushes its way through
like a ylang-ylang flower
and a damaged airplane like a lost petal
returns to the sky
and the little boy with my hands embroiders the collected sounds
I exhale so loudly that the dandelion’s
circle of insects dissipates
dawn…

[IT FELT LIKE BLOOD]

It felt like blood
on the floor of the subway car,
like sticky patterns of footprints—my new identity…

It felt like someone had turned me into
a bucket of strawberries,
and forgotten about it…
And the platform like a safe haven
and the—red beginnings of love—
between heart and throat.

I woke up as if no one was shooting,
only boys wander in
one stands nearby with a pistol,
and—bang-bang!—into the void…

But suddenly not just a crater—
But a black pit in the chest.
And tiny red droplets.

I am eating one strawberry—for the sick brother,
another, smaller one—for the son,
I am eating the slightly crushed one for him
who crushed my heart over the years.
And the last one—the biggest, the shiniest—
for my father who was never a father to me.

Put down your toy death.
Go, return the sun’s face
to the longest night for me.
Here are peonies and June,
and soldiers tightly standing.
And never,
never will anyone leave you again…

[THE POEMS BETWEEN US GREW SHORTER]

The poems between us grew shorter
until everything unwound into a single letter
with a period
which you turned on its head
because you liked exclamatory endings…
Finally, everything went quiet.
I became still as a white shell in the Paleozoic era.
I wish I hadn’t written words, biting my lip.
I wish I hadn’t written on the water with my fingertips.
I wish I hadn’t turned circles into a delicate zero…
You destroyed my Universe, flipped, abandoned
Forgot the address
Forgot the lanterns with flames in the window
Only letters
gnaw at memory
like mice gnaw at last year’s feed sack.
Short poems come with freedom for the blind.
Long poems come with a cage for those with sight.

[Purchase Issue 30 here.]

Anna Malihon is an award-winning Ukrainian poet and the author of six books of poetry and a novel. Her work has been published in numerous Ukrainian literary journals and translated into Bulgarian, Polish, Czech, Georgian, Armenian, and French. In 2022, Russia’s full-scale invasion forced her to leave Ukraine. She lives in Paris, France.

Olena Jennings is the author of the poetry collection The Age of Secrets, the chapbook Memory Project, and the novel Temporary Shelter. She is a translator of collections by Ukrainian poets Kateryna Kalytko (co-translated with Oksana Lutsyshyna), Iryna Shuvalova, Vasyl Makhno, Yuliya Musakovska, and Anna Malihon. She lives in Queens, New York.

The Universal Set

October 27, 2025 Issue 30, Issue 30 Poetry, Poetry, Translation

By PEDRO POITEVIN
Translated by PHILIP NIKOLAYEV

I am myself a member of myself
and every time I search within I find
another me, mysteriously aligned,
and in that replica wherein I delve

there dwells another, and another yet,
ellipsis dots: a mammoth nesting doll
that both contains itself, containing all,
and self-inhabits, the set of all sets.

I am the madness of the grand design,
I am the limit of where reason goes,
I am the science behind metascience.

The endless universe of sets is mine,
and this includes the cheeky set of those
denying my existence in defiance.

[Purchase Issue 30 here.]

Pedro Poitevin, a bilingual poet, translator, and mathematician originally from Guatemala, is the author of six books of poetry. His work has appeared in Rattle, River Styx, The Mathematical Intelligencer, and Nimrod, among other publications. In 2022, he received the Juana Goergen Poetry Prize, and in 2025, the Premio Internacional de Literatura Palindrómica Rever.

Philip Nikolayev is a poet living in Boston, raised in Moldova. He translates poetry from French, Romanian, Ukrainian, Hindi, Urdu, and Sanskrit. His collections include Monkey Time and Letters from Aldenderry. His collection of poems in Spanish translation by Willy Ramírez and Pedro Poitevin, Un poeta desde el balcón, has been published in Latin America.

Every Other Weekend

October 27, 2025 Issue 30, Issue 30 Poetry, Poetry

Winner of the 2025 DISQUIET Prize for Poetry

By CARSON WOLFE

The morning after I had woken to him
holding his flashlight beneath my bedsheets,

I told him I felt too sick to go to school.
It’s always confused me, why I chose

to stay in his house another full day,
waiting for my mother to finish work.

Like any other, we played chess
just like he’d taught me, and he let me win.

Something broken and unnameable
hanging between us—perhaps it is me,

writing this poem, watching myself
shrink as a ten-year-old, watching him

sacrifice another pawn. From this angle,
it occurs to me, after all these years,

that he knew I was going to tell.
And now I am afraid for that little girl.

How much easier it all could have been
had I tripped at the top of the stairs.

It must have crossed his mind
as those silent hours came to a close.

He didn’t reach over the gear stick
to rub my thigh on the drive home,

only stared out at the barriers
as we crossed Barton Bridge.

I always believed him
to be pathetic, a coward of a man,

but we pulled up outside my mum’s house
and he opened the door, let me out.

[Purchase Issue 30 here.]

Carson Wolfe is a Mancunian poet and the grand prize winner of the 2025 DISQUIET International Literary Prize. Their work has appeared with Poetry Magazine, The Rumpus, and Rattle, amongst others. Their new book Coin Laundry at Midnight is forthcoming with Button Poetry in spring 2026.

Ars Poetica: Getaway Car

October 27, 2025 Issue 30, Issue 30 Poetry, Poetry

By JEN JABAILY-BLACKBURN

Telekinesis stories are the girliest stories because they don’t stop
at The Body. They say your borders are so made up. Girlhood is more
than ovaries tossing replica moons at the feet of The Moon.
Our home address is a syntax that serpentines like a mouse
attempting to cross, unperceived, the grandest of ballrooms.
That’s us, always leaping into the getaway car of daydream,
lit up lavender & tangerine. We are dancing with our mouths
like no one is listening because no one is listening but us.
It’s the wild freedom of silly gooseness, feathers to cushion being told
you’re useless, repeatedly, while still being used for everything. It’s waiting
in the waiting room’s washed-out light thinking I am
an exhausted mine. No matter how much care you pour into it,
The Body’s narrative is betrayal. This expirational thing.
Do you really want us to end there?

[Purchase Issue 30 here.]

Jen Jabaily-Blackburn is the author of Girl in a Bear Suit and works as the program and outreach coordinator for The Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College. Originally from Braintree, Massachusetts, she now lives in Easthampton, Massachusetts, with her family. For more, find her at www.jenjabailyblackburn.com.