Four Poems by JinJin Xu

By JINJIN XU

Blue cover of There is Still Singing in the Afterlife

These poems are excerpted from the published work of JinJin Xu ’17, a guest at Amherst College’s LitFest 2025Register for this exciting, 10th-anniversary celebration of Amherst’s literary legacy and life.


 Table of Contents

  • “There They Are”
  • “To Your Brother, Who Is Without Name”
  • “The Revolution is Not a Dinner Party”
  • “Against This Earth, We Knock”

 

Four Poems by JinJin Xu
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LitFest 2025 Excerpts: Video Poems by Paisley Rekdal

Amherst College’s tenth annual literary festival runs from Thursday, February 27 to Sunday, March 2. Among the guests is PAISLEY REKDAL, whose book West: A Translation was longlisted for the National Book Award. The Common is pleased to reprint a short selection of video poems from West here.

Join Paisley Rekdal and Brandom Som in conversation with host Ruth Dickey, Executive Director of the National Book Foundation, on Sunday, March 2 at 2pm. 

Register and see the full list of LitFest events here.


Not

 

What Day

 

Heroic

 

Paisley Rekdal is the author of four books of nonfiction and seven books of poetry, most recently West: A Translation, which won the 2024 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and was longlisted for the National Book Award. The former Utah poet laureate, she teaches at the University of Utah, where she directs the American West Center.

LitFest 2025 Excerpts: Video Poems by Paisley Rekdal
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Gently

By DAN HECK

 

It’s sometime in 2007. I’m almost 21. At night I stock bulk items in the backroom of a Target. Dante helped me get the job. My best friend since eighth grade: the human bully-repellent with rockstar swagger and long, luscious hair. Target’s pay sucks, and I hate work, but it’s something I can do with Dante. 

Most nights, we unload the truck’s thousand or more items together. The two of us in a tight, hot, truck container, tearing down walls of packaged toys, clothes, food, and cleaning supplies. One time, the wall of goods is packed extra tight. It’s probably 120 degrees in the container and managers demand we keep the unload moving. I’m too precious with the cargo, so nothing moves and heat exhaustion creeps in. Eyesight blurs. Standing dizzies. I’m a couple sweats away from passing out. I get a cold Gatorade and a five-minute break, but only if I finish the unload. A manager threatens to steal both away.

Gently
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Home and/or Home: Seán Carlson Interviews Erin Fornoff and Gustav Parker Hibbett

Portraits of Seán Carlson, Erin Fornoff and Gustav Parker Hibbett

When ERIN FORNOFF, GUSTAV PARKER HIBBETT, and SEÁN CARLSON met over a drink in the lobby of the Arms Hotel, located on the main square of Listowel in southwest Ireland, they introduced themselves by comparing their American upbringings. Having grown up in North Carolina, New Mexico, and Massachusetts, respectively, they shared their experiences residing and writing in Ireland.

For Fornoff, Hibbett, and Carlson, their lives in Ireland have granted them new perspectives on their lives in the U.S. and welcomed them into new communities that help bring their poetry to life. Before leaving, they all paused for a photo beside a typewriter and a goose-feather quill pen on display under the gaze of a countertop cherub sculpture. In the longstanding hub of an agricultural community, where tractors still regularly cart calves to market, the traditional tools of writing also reinforced the lifeblood of local literature.

Home and/or Home: Seán Carlson Interviews Erin Fornoff and Gustav Parker Hibbett
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Mantra 5

By KRIKOR BELEDIAN
Translated by CHRISTOPHER MILLIS and TALINE VOSKERITCHIAN

Piece appears below in English and the original Armenian.

 

Translators’ Note

The pervasive sense of place in Krikor Beledian’s works was forged in the crucible of displacement.  Beledian grew up in the Beirut neighborhood of Hayashen, which was home to the waves of refugees from the Armenian genocide that Armenians refer to as the Catastrophe. 

The pre-eminent writer of Western Armenian literature, Beledian is a long-time resident of Paris, where he has authored more than 30 volumes, including poetry, a 10-volume novel cycle still in progress, literary criticism, experimental prose, and literary history.  And he has done so in the UNESCO-designated “endangered” language of Western Armenian. 

 “Mantra 5” is one of the 32 extended poems collected in Mantras. Beledian says that Mantra 5 was written from the tip of the Seine isle of Vert Gallant, which looks toward the Louvre and the metallic bridge of Pont des Arts. From this vantage point, the poem brings into its sphere multiple and often contradictory threads which are simultaneously at play, resulting in a fractured surface. Time and geography are superimposed on each other; just as the ruins of Palmyra appear in the Louvre, the shadowy dead of indeterminate origin course through the currents of the Seine and the Euphrates. The poem is both atonal dirge and palimpsest. 

In the Preface to Mantras, Beledian writes that “place is exile, and exile is the original catastrophe.”  The challenge of translating Beledian’s writing is its radical tenuousness—of place, time, and language itself.  This is a complex undertaking because Western Armenian belongs to a culture nearly obliterated in 1915, a Catastrophe bookended by centuries of displacement. English, particularly American English, belongs to the culture of conquest and certainty: How to render into English a poetic language which is acutely aware of its calamitous biography, its indeterminate attributes, and its mandate to give voice to the unspoken, unseen, unknown?

— Christopher Millis and Taline Voskeritchian

Mantra 5
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Dispatch from Camelback Mountain

By CHRISTOPHER AYALA

A mountainous terrain in Arizona with a cloudy blue sky in the backgroundPhoenix, AZ

Camelback’s faces wither in the sun. I used to hate Arizona and coming here and then I moved here and hated it and left and now all I think about is a good summer day and the lazy way a person can be themselves sifting through the desert, eating pizza, all that kind of stuff anyone does anywhere else, except then this mountain Camelback is available to burn off all those cheese calories. And that’s not the same everywhere. There is a part of me who everyday thinks of being back in Arizona walking around blistering days, laughing how when I had them to myself, I had thought this was the end of the line, that there had never been a worse place on earth. That’s mid-thirties type clarity.

Dispatch from Camelback Mountain
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Postscript

By KOMAL DHRUV

 

Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge is one of the most beloved Bollywood films of all time. The movie has been playing in theatres since its release in 1995, with Mumbai’s Maratha Mandir theater giving it an uninterrupted 25 year run as of 2020. The film follows the love story of happy-go-lucky Raj and dutiful Simran, two NRI’s1 who grew up in London with their immigrant parents. Raj and Simran meet on vacation while touring Europe, only to realize their love story must be cut short: when Simran returns home, her family plans to move back to Punjab to fulfill her arranged marriage to Ajit, the son of her father’s old friend. Raj, with the encouragement of his wealthy and supportive father, travels to India to win Simran’s family’s blessings before the wedding. After a dramatic fight at the local train station between Raj and Ajit, Simran’s father recognizes the love between Raj and Simran and releases his daughter, telling her to go conquer her own life. Simran runs across the platform in a golden dress, trying to catch Raj’s hand and make it on the train as it pulls out of the station.

While the credits roll, Raj and Simran take the train to Amritsar International Airport. No one flinches at his bloodied face–they’ve all seen stranger things on these commutes. The couple returns to London, buys a flat with their parents’ money, sets up house. Raj must find a job, and, given his qualifications, he takes one in his father’s company. Simran’s family returns too, after a few months’ vacation; enough time to allow her father to say goodbye to Punjab and to mourn the separation. Simran’s younger sister Chutki thanks God in her prayers every night.

Postscript
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Podcast: Julia Sanches on “The Advice”

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Transcript: Julia Sanches

Translator Julia Sanches speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about translating “The Advice,” a story by Irene Pujadas, which appears in The Common’s fall issue in a portfolio of writing by contemporary Catalan women. Julia talks about her translation process, and the importance of capturing the tone and style of a piece, like the understated absurdist humor in “The Advice.” Julia also discusses how she approaches collaboration with other translators, how she chooses the books and stories she wants to translate, and how starting her career at a literary agency gave her a crash course in the behind-the-scenes of publishing.Julia Sanches' headshot next to the cover of The Common Issue 28.

Podcast: Julia Sanches on “The Advice”
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January 2025 Poetry Feature #2: Rafael Alberti in Translation

Poems by RAFAEL ALBERTI
Translated from the Spanish by JOHN MURILLO

From Rafael Alberti’s Concerning the Angels, forthcoming in March from Four Way Books.

Book cover of Concerning the Angels by Rafael Alberti

Poems appear in both English and Spanish.

Table of Contents:

  • Introduction by John Murillo
  • LOS ÁNGELES VENGATIVOS (The Vengeful Angels)
  • CAN DE LLAMAS (Hound of Flames)
  • EL ÁNGEL TONTO (The Foolish Angel)
  • EL ÁNGEL DEL MISTERIO (The Angel of Mystery)
  • ASCENSIÓN (Ascension)
January 2025 Poetry Feature #2: Rafael Alberti in Translation
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A Tyranny of Dreams: Review of Proper Imposters

Reviewed by SAM SPRATFORD

Cover of Proper Imposters.
 
In Proper Imposters, Panhandler Books compiles four novellas from authors who are attuned to the mystical nature of doubles, a timeless form, and who hold them up to the contradictions of our moment, the paradoxes and counterparts on which our societies rest. MAURICIO MONTIEL FIGUEIRAS, JEFF PARKER, CHAYA BHUVANESWAR, AND JASON OCKERT each spin gripping tales of doppelgangers, pairs whose likeness in body or spirit fades in and out of focus. These are stories of concealment, intentional or not, and revelations of often melodramatic proportions. When the authors align these pieces just right, it resembles the dazzling effect of a hall of mirrors. Each author manages, at various times, to pierce through narrative’s typical strictures into the world of dreams, where fantastical images diagnose with overwhelming clarity the ills of our time.
A Tyranny of Dreams: Review of Proper Imposters
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