All posts tagged: Issue 28

The Common’s Issue 28 Launch Party

The Common’s Issue 28 Launch Party

September 24, 2024 ,

 

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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The Advice

The Advice

October 21, 2000 , , , ,

By IRENE PUJADAS
Translated by JULIA SANCHES

 

Spurred by the idea that you are interdependent and would do well to lean on others (on the opinions, advice, and experiences of others), you’re roped into taking part in a general meeting to decide your future. 

Some of your friends bring folders filled with graphs and statistics. One in particular comes bearing the works of authors, philosophers, historians, and psychoanalysts. Relevant passages are marked with Post-it notes.  

Your family and friends only want what’s best for you, or rather, they want you to do something.  

The Advice
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Solitude

Solitude

October 21, 2000 , ,

By ADRIENNE SU

I had had my fill,
but I kept devoting more 
days, then weeks to it, 

buying books, making 
no plans, as if empty slots 
would well up with rain, 

pushing anyone 
who might edge into my space 
away as if by 

natural forces. 
I never pledged anything 
permanent to it,  

Solitude
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Roadside Blackberries

Roadside Blackberries

October 21, 2000 , ,

By ZACK STRAIT

There were other vehicles moving through the darkness behind us. But we didn’t notice. We forced our bodies into the brambles. We stood on our tiptoes, reached high above our heads like we were greedy for the stars that night. But we craved something attainable, we thought. We thought our need was for the wild summer blackberries. But we were foraging for another memory to sustain us through the evil days to come. And as we ate, the past ripened in clusters for us there among the thorns. I don’t know what my father thought about then, as we filled our bellies with those dark jewels, but I could almost taste my grandmother’s fruit cobbler. The blackberries, I remember, were perfect that night. They were plump and sweet. The juice didn’t stain our fingers or mouths. We ate and ate. How wonderful, how the earth offers such goodness to us without cost. And how awful.  

Roadside Blackberries
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