Photos by Natasha Jahchan.
beirut and mount lebanon
dispatch from lebanon, 2023
April 30, 2025
Dispatches
All posts tagged: 2025
Review: Theory and Practice by Michelle de Kretser
April 21, 2025
Reviews
By MICHELLE DE KRETSER
Reviewed by AMBER RUTH PAULEN
One of the brilliances of Michelle de Kretser’s newest novel Theory and Practice is how the author lassoes life’s “messy truths” into a neat and slim book. To do so, de Kretser asks many questions at once: How does shame lead to silence? Why write? What to feel when an idol falls from grace? How do you break free from your mother (the Woolfmother included)? How do class and race determine your place in the world? What to do when life doesn’t fit your ideas about it? Additionally, de Kretser remains flexible in form: fiction blends with essayistic, academic, and autobiographical elements. Even the cover of the Australian edition features a young de Kretser, as if to say, this book might be about things that have actually happened. With so much going on, it might seem like the book would fall apart, but it is a concise and searing portrait of what it’s like to be alive in a certain place and time and body.
What We’re Reading: April 2025
April 18, 2025
Reviews
Curated by SAM SPRATFORD
The long New England winter is finally thawing, and here at The Common, we’re gearing up to launch our newest print issue! Issue 29 is full of poetry and prose by both familiar and new TC contributors, and a colorful, multimedia portfolio from Amman, Jordan. To tide you over, Issue 29 contributors DAVID LEHMAN and NATHANIEL PERRY share some of their recent inspirations, and ABBIE KIEFER recommends a poetry collection full of the spirit of spring.
Henry James’ short works; recommended by Issue 29 contributor David Lehman
I’ve been reading or rereading Henry James’s stories about writers and artists: “The Real Thing,” “The Lesson the Master,” “The Death of the Lion,” “The Tree of Knowledge,” “The Figure in the Carpet,” “The Aspern Papers,” et al. His sentences are labyrinthine, and you soon realize how little happens in a story; the ratio of verbiage to action is as high as the price-earnings ratio of a high-flying semiconductor firm. Yet we keep reading, not only for the syntactical journey but for the author’s subtle understanding of the artist’s psyche—and the thousand natural and artificial shocks that flesh and brain are heir to.
Glass: Five Sonnets
April 16, 2025
Dispatches
Author’s Note:
Cold War divided Berlin haunted me growing up because it was a place where history was unavoidably visible, and when I lived there for two-and-a-half years as a student in the 1990s, I was always watching and trying to document the city’s rapid changes after the Wall fell. In 2022 a cousin found an advertisement on Ebay from circa 1939 that showed images of the Potsdamer Platz S-Bahn station from my great-grandfather’s glass factory in Waldenburg (now Wałbrzych, Poland). I’m still processing what it means to have my family history connected to a place that is a central, broken image of Berlin and so crucial to the imagination of the Cold War, particularly at a time when we in the U.S. are (or should be) thinking about what the world looks like when democracy yields to authoritarianism.
Photo courtesy of author.
Berlin, Germany
Potsdamer Platz, Berlin, April 1939
We were successful in securing major commissions—for the Reichsbahn–
underground station Potsdamer Platz and Anhalter–Bahnhof—and in
fulfilling them on time. Such large-scale projects are crucial for breaking
fresh ground for sales of Opaxit glass.
—Annual Report of the Schlesische Spiegelglas Manufaktur
Carl Tielsch G.m.b.H., 1938
On Civilians: Victoria Kelly Interviews Jehanne Dubrow
April 14, 2025
Interviews
JEHANNE DUBROW is the author of ten poetry collections and three books of creative nonfiction. After twenty years in the U.S. Navy, her husband recently completed his tenure as an officer, and this transformation led Jehanne to write Civilians, the final book in her military spouse trilogy, a sequence that began with the publication of Stateside in 2010 and continued with Dots & Dashes in 2017.
Novelist, poet, and Marine veteran spouse VICTORIA KELLY sat down with Jehanne to discuss Civilians, which confronts pressing questions about marriage, transitions, love, and war. Though they have known each other virtually for over a decade—as two members of the very small literary community of military spouse writers—this was the first time they connected face-to-face.
Victoria Kelly (VK): Your new book Civilians is the final volume in your trilogy about the experience of being a modern military spouse. Can you give us some background on your family’s experience with the military?
Jehanne Dubrow (JD): I’m the daughter of two U.S. Foreign Service Officers. I grew up in American embassies overseas. To be a diplomat is to be a civil servant; so, I thought I understood—through my parents’ work—what it means to serve.
Inês
April 9, 2025
Fiction
I
I really don’t want to be that guy but this doesn’t make any sense. I mean, maybe it does, you tell me. I don’t know you, we never went, let’s say, to Varadero together. Us with straw hats, drinking cocktails by the sea with salt on the rim of the glass, Buena Vista Social Club playing on the speakers, me doing crosswords and you playing sudoku, me to you, Stimulate with seven letters, us playing beach tennis (nowadays you guys are so posh, playing padel every Saturday morning with another couple, I’m always making fun of you because of that, you jerks), us getting to the airport, me walking so clumsily, because I’m always in a hurry, because I didn’t want to bother that nice lady holding a kid in her arms that was in front of me in the security line and now I got behind. I pick up my things, oh so gracelessly, I hold my backpack by one of its wings and start walking while I try to put on my belt, so that now I look like Quasimodo, if Quasimodo was a pervert, almost running because it’s time to go and ring that bell, with his pants falling down. You guys laugh at me, you say something I can’t quite understand, but I don’t get offended because, after all, we’re friends and that’s what friends do. I realize now that we are perfectly on time. I always am, we still have half an hour before boarding. So, you go get some chocolates for the flight while I go look at the books and CDs. I have a weird fascination with ugly covers and gas-station CDs. If we’re going to Varadero together, I think you should know that. Us going to a Cohen gig. Us drinking a pint at some bar in Alvalade. You guys to me, João. Me, Yes. You guys, It’s my father. I start to get emotional (I get emotional so easily), trying not to cry, because you’re not crying, even before realizing if what happened to your father was serious or not. I always liked your father very much.
Poems in Tutunakú and Spanish by Cruz Alejandra Lucas Juárez
April 3, 2025
Poetry, Translation
By CRUZ ALEJANDRA LUCAS JUÁREZ
Translated by WENDY CALL & WHITNEY DEVOS
Poems appear below in English, and Spanish and Tutunakú, the original languages.
Translators’ Note
Poet Cruz Alejandra Lucas Juárez creates her work bilingually, in Spanish—the language in which she was educated—and in Tutunakú—the language in which she was raised. Tutunakú is the home language of approximately 220,000 people in the Mexican states of Puebla and Veracruz. It has multiple variants and Lucas Juárez seeks out speakers from different communities to expand her poetic vocabulary.
She generally begins writing in Tutunakú, but lines also come to her in Spanish, so she moves back and forth between the two versions of each poem, creating the bilingual pair simultaneously. “It’s two creation processes happening at the same time,” she says. Tutunakú is agglutinative, so it contains words up to a dozen syllables long that translate as whole phrases or sentences in Spanish. Her translation process must be “letter by letter, not word by word, because each word contains so much,” she explains. Tutunakú is also a highly metaphorical language: “being pregnant” translates to “I am not alone,” while “I miss you” translates literally as “My stomach is sinking.”
Although poetry is a regular part of Tutunakú cultural life, Lucas Juárez is the first woman to publish a book of poetry in the language. These poems are drawn from her 2021 debut collection, Xlaktsuman papa’ / Las hijas del Luno. The title, “Daughters of Luno,” uses the masculine version of the Spanish word for moon (luna). Luno is the metaphorical father of Tutunakú women.
We began co-translating “Daughters of Luno” in 2023, inspired by the depth of Lucas Juárez’ poetic voice, written when Lucas Juárez was in her early twenties. To create our English translations, we worked primarily from the Spanish, observing and listening to the Tutunakú versions, though neither of us has formally studied the language. We met with the poet in person and via video call, and also exchanged many messages. We are grateful for her patience, generosity, and linguistic expertise, all of which have been crucial to our process.
— Wendy Call & Whitney Devos
Table of Contents
- Litutunaaku
- Tantsulut Bird
- The Voice of The Buried
“Litutunaaku” is the Tututnakú people’s name for themselves. The word translates as “people who belong to the culture of the three hearts,” referencing the brain (memory), the antomical heart (physical life), and the stomach (emotional experience). Together, these three interdependent “hearts” sustain Tutunakú “triple consciousness.” “Li,” the word’s first syllable, refers to a Tutunakú person’s homeplace—which is central to identity.
Podcast: Michael David Lukas on “More to the Story”
March 28, 2025
Podcast, Podcasts & Audio
Transcript: Michael David Lukas
Michael David Lukas speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his essay “More to the Story,” which appears in The Common’s fall issue. Michael talks about his writing process for the essay, which began when a dark family mystery moved him to research a side of his family he’d never learned much about. He also discusses the revision stages of the piece, which included adding in details of the other side of the family—his mother’s parents—who were Holocaust survivors. We also talk about his time as a nightshift proofreader in Tel Aviv, and the new novel project he’s working on now.
March 2025 Poetry Feature: Catherine-Esther Cowie’s Heirloom
March 27, 2025
Poetry
Poems by CATHERINE-ESTHER COWIE
Having made both poetry and fiction contributions to TC, the multitalented Catherine-Esther Cowie returns to us this month with highlights from her debut poetry collection Heirloom, forthcoming from Carcanet Press on April 24, 2025.
Publisher’s Note
Moving from colonial to post-colonial St. Lucia, this debut collection brings to light the inheritances of four generations of women, developing monologues, lyrics, and narrative poems which enable us to see how past dysfunction, tyranny, and terror structure the shapes of women’s lives, and what they hand down to one another.
Uneasy inheritances are just the starting point for this debut’s remarkable meditations: Should the stories of the past be told? Do they bring redemption or ruin? What are the costs of saying what happened? Beguiling and cathartic, Catherine-Esther Cowie’s powerful, formally inventive poems reckon with the past even as they elegize and celebrate her subjects.
Table of Contents
- Mother: Frankenstein
- A Bedtime Prayer
- The War
- Haunting
Raise the dead. The cross-stitched
face. Her eye-less eye. My long
longings brighten, like tinsel, the three-fingered
hand. Ashen lip. To exist in fragments.
To exist at all. A comfort.
A gutting. String her up then,
figurine on the cot mobile.
And I am the restless infant transfixed.
Her full skirt, a plume of white feathers,
A Bedtime Prayer
We ate the fruit Lord,
boiled and buttered we ate.
Thought nothing of it.
It was pleasing to the eye.
Filled our mouths, our bellies.
It was the fruit of a breadfruit tree.
A tree as old as the first city.
How it grew taller than the house.
Those monstrous leaves.
Its roots echoing— cracks in the walls.
Its shadow falling through the back door, the corridor,
lengthening towards the front—
Ghost of our first father,
ghost begetting ghosts,
our lives thinned into his weakness,
his terror.
But we were fed, fed, fed.
*
Lord, you have cast us off,
left us to starve,
Sent that girl.
Girl born with a veiled face,
a caul, calling.
How did she find the axe?
She wouldn’t eat the fruit,
refused its sweetness,
weight of our father,
the first city.
Lord, she went down to the garden,
an axe flowering in her hand.
It was you Lord, the bouden blan
chirping in her ear.
What cruel instructions?
Didn’t we do your will,
kept a remembrance—
the tree,
our father,
we were hungry, Lord.
The tree fell into the house.
The War
St. Lucia, 194-
A disturbed hour, the sky loud
with the memory of assault.
But still, it’s Sunday, the trees shake
like shac-shacs in the breeze,
and the sea goes on and on
with its lullaby like it has never
given cover to the enemy.
It is Sunday,
and we go on with our lovemaking.
I refuse to hush, let my pleasure rise
against the weary tones
in the thin-walled rooms like ours,
it was yesterday, only yesterday,
another body washed ashore…
Forever and forever,
death our only guarantee.
Haven’t I died already,
years ago, on a kitchen floor,
under the weight of a different man,
my girlhood shot through,
I learnt the body as machine—
dead heart, dead pubis.
It is Sunday,
I teem with life like the flies
swarming the torpedoed ships
in the harbour.
Haunting
We frighten the children.
My hair ragged in red cloth,
I speak a language they don’t understand,
their ears tuned to English, tuned
to American cartoons.
And Leda, Gwanmanman Leda runs
cracks up the walls,
through the centre of our dinner plates.
It’s their own fault, you know,
they won’t stay in their rooms.
How she endures, endures,
Gwanmanman Leda. Leda.
Even after I married,
after she died, she endures.
Tanbou mwen.
Jab mwen.
But the children,
the children.
They stare.
Regard me strangely, sadly.
There will be no walk to the park today.
No jump rope high.
Only their rooms.
They will stay in their rooms.
Alé, alé. I chase.
They hide behind a wall. Spy.
I must clean my house like I cleaned Leda’s room.
Scrubbing. A form of memory.
A song. Trojan horse for my own blues.
Keeper of the madness.
The mad. Leda.
Mwen faché.
I was only a child,
only a child
made for play,
not the washing of soiled sheets,
of shit-stained walls,
of an old woman.
But the children,
how they stare.
Their blink-less eyes.
Pouty lips.
Why won’t they go into their rooms?
Leave me to Leda.
We are a pair.
She, because of her bad head.
Mal tèt. And I,
because I was a child.
Small. Piti.
Crushable.
Like a roach.
The mad and the little,
The mad and the little,
Give them a tickle,
Then a prickle.
Leda, stop your singing.
And I must stop this fool parade.
This arm muscling towards memory—
You’ve made it up,
Isn’t that what they said?
Mal tèt, bad head.
No one ever hit you. Mantè.
Isn’t that what they said?
But Leda, Leda,
my sweet Leda.
Mad monument.
Rogue memory.
But we must think of the children.
They cry for us, Mommy, Mommy.
Catherine-Esther Cowie was born in St. Lucia to a Trinidadian father and a St. Lucian mother. She migrated with her family to Canada and then to the USA. Her poems have been published in PN Review, Prairie Schooner, West Branch Journal, The Common, SWWIM, Rhino Poetry and others. Cowie is a Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop fellow.
A Tomato Behind a Glass Cage
March 25, 2025
Essays
By SARAH WU
As a senior, I am still figuring out jobs and Things That Are After College. So when I have the opportunity to meet alumni from my college working in the sustainability field, I decide to go. Our group of students journeys to Boston, and when we get off the bus, the icy snow pinches our tender cheeks and exposed hands.
