All posts tagged: Iqra Khan

Iqra

Winner of the DISQUIET Prize for Poetry 
By IQRA KHAN

I begin as revelation. As explosion of glottal light against silence.
I am again asking for directions to the Haram, my ankles fluent in Arabic.

I am again asking for direction, ya Haram, my ankles flowing with Arabic!
Hagar, watch how God transforms this wilderness to civilization.

Iqra
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The Common’s Issue 28 Launch Party

 

The Common Issue 28 Cover: very dark blue-green-black background with white bar of soap and white sudsThe Common Fall Launch Party—Locals Night!
Wednesday, October 23, 2024, 7pm
Friendly Reading Room, Frost Library
Amherst College, Amherst, MA

Free and open to the public, wine and snacks will be provided. 

 

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!

 

Issue 28 headshots of authors

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. 

The Common’s Issue 28 Launch Party
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June 2024 Poetry Feature: New Poems by Our Contributors

New poems by our contributors DAN ALBERGOTTI, KATE GASKIN, IQRA KHAN, and CARSON WOLFE 

Table of Contents: 

  • Dan Albergotti, “The Dumb Show” 
  • Kate Gaskin, “Newest Baby” 
  • Iqra Khan, “I Seek Refuge” 
  • Carson Wolfe, “Jack Kerouac Begs Me to Get an Abortion” 

 

The Dumb Show 
By Dan Albergotti 

They showed you the models. They warned you well
in advance. Levels and gasses and ice melt and us.
Storms and floods and fires and famine and us.
And now it’s here. And now you act surprised.

When I was studying Hamlet in college,
I wondered how Claudius could be so taken aback 
by the inner play’s events when the silent pantomime 
of the dumb show had already given away the plot.

My professor explained that the royals
would usually ignore the dumb show, would shield
their eyes, thinking such explanatory preamble
to the play itself was far beneath their station.

The dumb show was for the average folk, he said.
In the end, both Rosencrantz and Claudius are dead.

June 2024 Poetry Feature: New Poems by Our Contributors
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