All posts tagged: New York

Poems From The Life Assignment

By RICARDO ALBERTO MALDONADO

Join us as we celebrate The Common contributor, Ricardo Maldonado’s, Pub Day with poems in both English and Spanish from his debut book of poetry, The Life Assignment.

book cover.jpg

 I Give You My Heart

I find myself on my feet with fifteen leaves.
Everything carries its own light on the walls.

I woke up to slaughter, my heart opening
to cemeteries of moon—

the parasites, the drizzle. The mud crowning
the undergrowth with immense sadness.

I knew death when I dressed
in my uniform.

I found the index of solitude: my country
in its legal jargon, its piety, its fiction—

Yes. It loves me, really.

I give my blood as the blood of all fish.

Poems From The Life Assignment
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A Walk Inside the Epicenter

By MARIA TERRONE

Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, NY
Jackson Heights, Queens
           

By the time you read this, more of my neighbors will be dead.

And yet, on this sunny spring day that belies the grim headlines, I need to go for a walk, that most mundane of human activities. I need to pretend that life is normal. To forget that just a short distance from my apartment stands Elmhurst Hospital, the epicenter of the coronavirus within New York City, itself America’s epicenter.

A Walk Inside the Epicenter
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Intimations and Mercy, a Letter from the Bronx

By JUDITH BAUMEL

Image of book cover

“Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room,” I intoned solemnly when things were normal back in the BC days (Before COVID). “In truth the prison, unto which we doom/Ourselves; no prison is.” I winked at my “Forms in Poetry” class to let them know I felt their pain. It turned out to be our last face-to-face meeting for the semester. We were studying the sonnet and I’ve always used William Wordsworth’s love poem to strict forms as a pep talk for beginning prosodists. “And hence for me,/In sundry moods, ‘twas pastime to be bound/Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground.”

Easy for you to say, I tell my three-weeks-ago self. I had no idea what was about to hit us. I’ll bet my shrinking TIAA stash that you didn’t either.

Intimations and Mercy, a Letter from the Bronx
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Ticks in the Hedgerows

By AMANDA M. FAIRBANKS

Image of person running into grove

Last May, having exhausted all possible local options, my husband and I got into our car and drove one hundred miles west. We left home early that morning in search of two specific things: better medical care and a definitive diagnosis.

During that first drive into Manhattan, we held hands. Almost ten years into our marriage, it’s something we rarely do anymore — and certainly not for prolonged periods of time. Looking back now, I was holding on for dear life. 

Ticks in the Hedgerows
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Ask a Local: Aimée Baker, Plattsburgh, New York

With AIMÉE BAKER

Image of lake and sky

Your name: Aimée Baker

Current city or town: Plattsburgh, NY

How long have you lived here: Technically in Plattsburgh itself, 1 year. In the surrounding area, 30 years.

Three words to describe the climate: Bitterly cold, snowy

Best time of year to visit? Unless you can handle extreme cold, winter and second winter (also known as spring) may not be the best choice. We often get down to -20 to -30 wind chills here. The best time to come is during the fall when the hills and mountains turn red and gold with the changing leaves.

Ask a Local: Aimée Baker, Plattsburgh, New York
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The Aladdin Hotel, Woodbourne, NY

By ERICA EHRENBERG

The swimming pool is empty—another one is full but cracked and there are leaves floating in it. I’m sitting with my grandfather. He’s blind and our point of contact is a limit bolts of recognition pass through.

He saw me once in a pool under the water so he sees this in his mind often when he’s near me. He tells me about swimming across a river. Where is this river? I see branches with blue-black berries on them sinking into the water, each berry so loaded with his memory and my imagination they burst with their own reality.

The Aladdin Hotel, Woodbourne, NY
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Resisting the Path of Least Resistance: An Interview with Jennifer Egan

On the Friday of LitFest, Amherst College’s annual literary festival, The Common Editor in Chief Jennifer Acker sat down with Jennifer Egan, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, among other accolades, to talk about crime, place, and “timely” writing. This is an edited version of that live interview from March 1, 2019. 

jennifer egan and jennifer acker in conversation

Resisting the Path of Least Resistance: An Interview with Jennifer Egan
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Holiday in Queens

By SUSAN HARLAN

train

Queens, New York

1. On the W, December 23

When I’m back in the city and on the subway, I tend to look at my book or at my feet and the feet of other people. I note the different kinds of shoes, their colors and states of wear.

Today is December 23, so there are shopping bags by all the shoes, held fast between lower legs and sometimes kicked out of the way of people coming and going. Bags filled with brown boxes and shoe boxes and stacks of folded clothes.

I’m sitting down, and a man stands above me with his back to me. Under his left arm is a cardboard box that says 6H on the side in thick permanent marker. He never turns around, and I never see him, but I know that he lives in 6H.

Holiday in Queens
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November 2018 Poetry Feature: New York Elegies

New York Elegies Cover

This month we offer you selections from New York Elegies: Ukrainian Poems on the City, edited by TC contributor, Ostap Kin, forthcoming from Academic Studies Press.

Ukrainian poets have long connected themselves to the powerful myth of New York, offering various takes on its aura of urban modernity, its problematic vitality. New York Elegies demonstrates how evocations of New York City are connected to various stylistic modes and topical questions urgent to Ukrainian poetry throughout the past hundred years.

November 2018 Poetry Feature: New York Elegies
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