Sarah Wu

Poetry as an Ethnographic Tool: Leah Zani interviews Adrie Kusserow

May 13, 2024 Interviews

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.

Rabbit

April 22, 2024 Fiction, Issue 27, Issue 27 Fiction

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.

Call and Response

April 22, 2024 Issue 27, Issue 27 Poetry, Poetry

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

Avenue B

April 22, 2024 Issue 27, Issue 27 Poetry, Poetry

By KEVIN HAUTIGAN

If you ever want to feel real,
even important,
cry on the street.
Sob. Heave. Bum a half-smoked cigarette.

Ecstasy Facsimile

April 22, 2024 Issue 27, Issue 27 Poetry, Poetry

By MARK ANTHONY CAYANAN

The Common Magazine · “Ecstasy Facsimile” by Mark Anthony Cayanan

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

Exploring the Intersection: Coptic Motifs and Social Realism in Eritrean Art

April 22, 2024 Issue 27, Issue 27 Art, Studio

By MICHAEL ADONAI

Waidel (2008), acrylic on canvas (20.5 x 90.5 cm)

A Cause Postponed

April 22, 2024 Arabic Fiction, Fiction, Issue 27, Issue 27 Fiction, Translation

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!

Podcast: Amanda Mei Kim on “California Obscura”

April 19, 2024 Podcast, Podcasts & Audio

Listen on Apple Podcasts.

Listen on Spotify.

Transcript: Amanda Mei Kim

Amanda Mei Kim speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her essay “California Obscura,” which appears in The Common’s most recent issue, in a portfolio of writing and art from and about the immigrant farmworker community. Amanda discusses how the essay changed and developed over many drafts. The finished piece explores her childhood growing up on her parents’ tenant farm in Saticoy, California, just north of Los Angeles. It also examines the long history of farmworker resistance and labor movements in the area, which crossed divides of race, ethnicity, and origin.

Dark Vader

April 9, 2024 Fiction

By ANNELL LÓPEZ

“Dark Vader” is excerpted from Annell López’s I’ll Give You a Reason, out now from Feminist Press.

I was registering for the GED when Junie stormed into the house, slamming the door behind her. Her heavy Princess and the Frog backpack fell off her shoulder; the drop made the hardwood floors of our walk-up tremble.

Translation: Poems from The Dickinson Archive

April 4, 2024 Poetry, Translation

By MARÍA NEGRONI
Translated by ALLISON A. DEFREESE

Poems appear below in English and the original Spanish.

Translator’s note:
The Dickinson Archive is a series of 72 short meditations exploring the creative process through the lens of New England poet Emily Dickinson’s lifework and words. Dickinson said she was in the presence of poetry when “I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off.” The Dickinson Archive is a book that elicits such responses. Its poems, based on a few of the 9,000 words that Dickinson used most often, get under our skin and into our bones—whether our internal scaffolding is thick as a mammoth’s tusk or delicate as the rib of a songbird. Though María modestly describes the book as a “tribute,” the unique and unconventional pieces in this archive showcase Negroni’s own experimentation with form and language. Moments in these translations where word choice or grammatical structure may give the reader pause are not accidents; they are examples of Negroni at her finest as an experimental writer forging a cadence, locution, and syntax all her own. The Dickinson Archive is a book about play and creation. What light and lightness to translate such poems, to join this dialogue between women that spans continents and centuries, to channel the spirit of Emily Dickinson’s work through María Negroni’s words.