By ALI SHAPIRO
Lightning Talk on I-90 by Ali Shapiro
Ali Shapiro’s work has appeared in Gertrude, Popula, PrairieS
Olive Amdur
March 2024 Poetry Feature: New Poems by Our Contributors
March 28, 2024
Poetry
New poems by our contributors DAVID LEHMAN, MATT DONOVAN, JULIA KOLCHINSKY DASBACH, and GRAY DAVIDSON CARROLL
Table of Contents:
- David Lehman, “Honor Code” and “Rhode Island is Famous for You (for Denise Duhamel)”
- Matt Donovan, “Looking at the Statue of Athena in Nashville’s Replica of the Parthenon, Waiting for Something to Happen”
- Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, “What does the vulture say to the snowman(?) or how my son is learning to tell jokes(.)”
- Gray Davidson Carroll, “November 19, 2022,”
Reaching a Pulse Point: Melody Nixon Interviews Rushi Vyas
March 11, 2024
Interviews
Content warning: This interview discusses death by suicide.
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MELODY NIXON and RUSHI VYAS first met at a 2020 poetics seminar hosted by the University of Otago, where Vyas is completing a PhD in Poetics. Since that meeting Nixon and Vyas have exchanged thoughts on poetry, grief, and their own experiences of parental death by suicide as they each became new parents themselves.
This conversation distills some of those themes in relation to Vyas’ 2023 chasmic collection When I Reach for Your Pulse (Four Way Books and Otago University Press), which was a two-time finalist for the National Poetry Series and is currently longlisted for New Zealand’s Ockham Book Awards. Vyas is also co-author of the collaborative chapbook Between Us, Not Half a Saint with Rajiv Mohabir (Gasher Press, 2021). Born in Toledo, Ohio, Vyas now lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin, Aotearoa New Zealand, while Nixon lives on another Aotearoa island in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington.
Mala Beads
March 6, 2024
Dispatches
Yucca Valley, California
When she wakes, I offer water. She sips from the glass. I ask if she needs more pillows behind her head. I look into her eyes and notice that she has deep blue lines that circle her almost black pupils. Why hadn’t I seen that before? I think of the nazars that I bought in Athens fifteen summers ago. Those glass amulets to ward off the evil eye were also called evil eyes. A source of protection against a malevolent gaze. Things make me choke, she says suddenly, then closes her eyes again.
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I’m with my younger sister and my 89-year-old mother at a rental in Yucca Valley, California. It’s nearly 100 degrees outside, tumbleweeds and succulents outside the door. My sister and I drink cold water and blast the air con.
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Fatigue Can Shatter A Person
February 13, 2024
Essays
By ED YONG
This piece originally appeared in The Atlantic. Journalist Ed Yong will be a guest at Amherst College’s LitFest 2024. Register for this exciting celebration of Amherst’s literary legacy and life.
Alexis Misko’s health has improved enough that, once a month, she can leave her house for a few hours. First, she needs to build up her energy by lying in a dark room for the better part of two days, doing little more than listening to audiobooks. Then she needs a driver, a quiet destination where she can lie down, and days of rest to recover afterward. The brief outdoor joy “never quite feels like enough,” she told me, but it’s so much more than what she managed in her first year of long COVID, when she couldn’t sit upright for more than an hour or stand for more than 10 minutes. Now, at least, she can watch TV on the same day she takes a shower.
The Other Side of the Moon
January 31, 2024
Fiction
The day of the moon landing, George and I planned to hunt for rocks. Jorge was his actual name, but he preferred to go by George, like The Beatles guitar man. We were going to look for samples just like the astronauts would.
I sprang out of bed and cranked the window open. Looking out between the twisting glass slats, I noticed the leaves of our lemon tree were still. I hoped it meant the rains would stay away, even though July afternoon downpours in Cuba were as regular as the blood orange sunsets.
After dressing to the sound of Mima’s clanging in the kitchen and the scent of coffee brewing, I sat at the dining table. I dipped a piece of stale Cuban bread into the café-con-leche she’d set there. “It needs sugar,” I said.
“You don’t need more sugar,” she said.
But I didn’t understand why. Sugar was the one thing on the island that wasn’t rationed.
I asked if she was going to my friend Raul’s house to watch the moon landing. His family had the only working television in the neighborhood.
“Maybe,” she said.
I’d dreamt about the moon landing even before I learned that the Americans were going to do it. Ever since I read Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, a book George had given me, I’d been imagining a spaceship just like the one in the book: a long, narrow, bullet-like rocket, slicing through the heavens.
Mima wasn’t much of a reader. Not much of a dreamer either. I think that was why she’d never thought of leaving Cuba, even though everyone else seemed to be doing so.
“What are they looking for up there, anyway?” she said. “We have enough to worry about right here.”
The Most-Read Pieces of 2023
January 30, 2024
News and Events
As our new year of publishing and programming picks up speed, we at The Common wanted to reflect on the pieces that made last year such a great one! We published over 200 pieces online and in print in 2023. Below, you can browse a list of the six most-read pieces of 2023 to see which stories, essays, and poems left an impact on readers.
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Two Poems from The Spring of Plagues by Ana Carolina Assis, translated by Heath Wing
“i wish I could / prevent your death / and bury your body alive / in the puny damp / earth
we tended / so that it kept on living / mandioca corn banana / would not sprout forth /
but instead / acerola cherry blackberry pitanga hog plum.”
January 2023 Poetry Feature, with work by Tina Cane, Myronn Hardy, and Marc Vincenz
“Sheila had IHOP delivered to her apartment in El Alto, NY / on January 6th
so she could kick back self-proclaimed terrorist / that she is and eat pancakes
while watching white supremacists / storm the Capital.”
The Story of A Box by Jeffrey Harrison
“Duchamp gave my grandparents the Boîte-en-valise in the early 1960s. It was one of many handmade boxes Duchamp created containing miniature versions of his paintings and other works. This item… might have been the most intriguing to my siblings and me.”
Dispatch from Moscow, Idaho by Afton Montgomery
“The neighbor children are in the Evangelical cult that Vice and The Guardian wrote about last year. They’re not allowed to speak to us, which is a thing no one has ever said aloud but is true, nonetheless. This town is full of true things that no one says aloud.”
Five Poems by Serbian Poet Milena Marković, translated by Steven and Maja Teref
“the girl isn’t wearing warm socks / some men catcall her at the bus station / she pretends not to hear them / the barking dog chases the escaping sun / there used to be a landfill / behind the supermarket / black birds used to have lunch / and even dinner there.”
Farmworker Poetry Feature, with work by Rodney Gomez
“If I sang I was sinful, I was animal. Stole sips from circumscribed fountains.
I said murciélago, my knuckles drew a ruler. I said San Judas, my arm was viced.
Survived by christening the bruise a train track.”
Thanks for a great year! We are excited to continue sharing work by writers all over the world with you in 2024. Keep up with the art, prose, and poetry we publish each week by subscribing to our newsletter!
Review: Happy by Celina Baljeet Basra
January 22, 2024
Reviews
Review by MELISSA HOLBROOK PIERSON
Everything about Happy Singh Soni, the titular hero of Celina Baljeet Basra’s stinging first novel, is unlikely. He is the son of Punjabi cabbage farmers, but he fancies himself a screenwriter and prospective movie actor in the mold of Nouvelle Vague darling Sami Frey. (Indeed, he has effectively memorized Godard’s Bande à part.) He imagines his future in a Europe of all the classic allures, living in an elegant stone house with a yellow door; he is all about the details, which are uniformly sensual and full of wonder to him. Even as a child on his parents’ modest farm, he begins practicing for the day when his public utterances will be sought after by the press, so he invents a series he titles “The Loo Interviews,” conducted by an eager reporter for the gossipy Jodhpur News . . . while he occupies the privy.
He is in exuberant love with all he experiences, especially his mother’s adoringly proffered fried treats. Happy even appreciates the pests that afflict the surrounding farmland that is slowly being consumed by the amoeba of a badly managed Disneyland knockoff called Wonderland, where he takes a desultory job in which his nascent talents are ignored. He is the kind of imaginative soul who can’t help but personify even the stars in the sky (“Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde”).
Call for Submissions: A Special Folio on China after 2008
January 10, 2024
News and Events
The Common, in collaboration with guest editor Cleo Qian, will publish a special online folio of work about youth and contemporary culture from writers with a strong tie to Mainland China. Submissions will open on February 1st.
For the rest of the world, China’s 2008 Summer Olympics—with its $40 billion budget, dramatic “Bird’s Nest” stadium, and the lavish spectacle of its opening ceremony—marked the ascension of a new economic superpower onto the modern stage. Since then, new generations of Chinese youth have come of age into a society constantly rippling with changes, inundated with globalization, technology, and consumerism. The West continues to view China with curiosity, suspicion, and a sense of enigma as the country rapidly industrialized and urbanized, and its economic and political influence continues to shift. Yet Chinese literature translated into English is still predominantly written by older authors from the period of WW2, Maoism, and the Cultural Revolution, while neglecting the up-and-coming generation of Chinese artists, now dealing with wholly different lifestyles and sets of concerns.
December 2023 Poetry Feature: Part II
December 28, 2023
Poetry
New poems by our contributors CHRISTOPHER BAKKEN, CYRUS CASSELLS, JAMES RICHARDSON, CATIE ROSEMURGY
Table of Contents:
- Christopher Bakken, “Theology at Dalabelos”
- Cyrus Cassells, “Horsemen Watching Two Ancient Cities Burn”
- James Richardson, “Train Dreams”
- Catie Rosemurgy, “Diorama 1871 (say her name five times)”
