By AMY STUBER
Alice wants to walk on the trail, but Renee wants to wander. At least that’s what I imagine.
Maybe Alice tells Renee, “It takes two hours to get to the lake. Let’s keep moving,” and probably Renee heads down offshoot paths to get closer to the falls. In the first half-hour, on their way to the lake at the peak, they see a fox, a mother and baby moose, and three animatronic-looking deer.
This piece is part of a special portfolio featuring new and queer voices from China. Read more from the portfolio here.
By WU WENYING, SU SHI, SHANGYANG FANG, YUN QIN WANG, and CAO COLLECTIVE.
Translated poems appear in both the original Chinese and in English.
Table of Contents:
The Common Fall Launch Party—Locals Night!
Join The Common for the launch of Issue 28! We welcome four esteemed contributors who happen to be local: Disquiet Prize-winning poet Iqra Khan, MacArthur Fellow Brad Leithauser, environmental economist James K. Boyce, and fiction and essay writer Douglas Koziol. Issues will be available for purchase. We’ll have brief readings, a short Q&A, and lots of time to mingle!
Left to Right: Iqra Khan, James K. Boyce, Douglas Koziol, Brad Leithauser
Iqra Khan is a Pushcart-nominated poet, activist, and lawyer. She is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at UW Madison. She is also a winner of the 2024 Disquiet Prize in poetry and the Frontier Global Poetry Prize 2022. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Indiana Review, Denver Quarterly, Puerto del Sol, Southeast Review, Adroit Journal, Swamp Pink, The Rumpus, among others. Her work is centered around collective nostalgia, Muslim credibility, and the Muslim burden of becoming.
Poet, novelist, essayist, Brad Leithauser is the author of eighteen books, the most recent of which is Rhyme’s Rooms: The Architecture of Poetry. His nineteenth, The Old Current, a collection of poems, will be published by Knopf next spring. He is a former theater critic for Time, and the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2005, he was inducted into the Order of the Falcon by the president of Iceland. A former professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, he lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.
James K. Boyce is an author, naturalist, and environmental economist. He is the recipient of the 2017 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought and the 2024 Global Inequality Research Award. “Return of the Puffin” is adapted from his book-in-progress, Our Better Nature. Website: www.jameskboyce.com.
Douglas Koziol is a writer living in Western Massachusetts. His short fiction and essays have appeared in Quarterly West, The Millions, and Lunch Ticket, among other places. He received his MFA from Emerson College.
ADRIE KUSSEROW and LEAH ZANI are a rare sort: trained cultural anthropologists and poets, anthro-poets. The two met while Adrie was judging the Ethnographic Poetry Prize, the world’s only prize for poetry written by anthropologists. Shortly after, they began working together on the editorial team of Anthropology and Humanism, one of the few peer-reviewed academic journals that accepts poetry.
In this interview, Leah Zani connects with Kusserow about her latest memoir, The Trauma Mantras: A Memoir in Prose Poems (Duke University Press, 2024), a collection of prose poems based on Kusserow’s experiences with refugee communities and humanitarian projects in Nepal, India, Bhutan, Uganda, South Sudan, and the United States. In this conversation, they discuss the lyricism of suffering and the role of poetry in enriching deep anthropological understandings of place.
By JADE SONG
Hu Tianbao waves to asphalt and sky. The bumper of his mother’s car has long since exited the drop-off zone, yet he still stands moving his arm in the building’s entrance doorway. Left right left right dawdles his hand. A farewell to punctuality. He’s alone, everyone else already nestled in their classrooms, reciting poems.
By TREY MOODY
My grandmother likes to tell me dogs
understand everything you say, they just can’t
say anything back. We’re eating spaghetti
while I visit from far away. My grandmother
just turned ninety-four and tells me dogs
understand everything you say, they just can’t
If you ever want to feel real,
even important,
cry on the street.
Sob. Heave. Bum a half-smoked cigarette.
Longing to make his life compact as sushi, my shame
borrows the saint’s apron, shackles his swivel in her cincture. My shame
walks the earth with an electric blanket, goes to the gym to window-shop with
it, heads for the hills where he takes selfies meditating. To the person
on the bus who inquires, my shame
By SIMON ABRAHAM ODHOK AKUDNYAL
Translated by ADDIE LEAK
The teacher, Ms. Nyiboth, was tenderhearted and gorgeous, with a small, proud beauty mark on the bottom of her left cheek. Her features added to her charm, and as for her voice, it had some hidden magic; whenever we heard it, we were tickled by a kind of madness that made us go still and quiet, as if a gentle breeze had blown through the class. I remember the time fate smiled on me and I got a perfect score on that month’s test; you wouldn’t believe how happy I was when Nyiboth came close and patted me encouragingly on the head. Her hand was soft, her warm touch enveloped me, and there are no words for how I felt; it gave me goosebumps. And now here I was, being beaten like a mangy donkey in front of her. How degrading!
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