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The Aladdin Hotel, Woodbourne, NY

April 15, 2019 Issue 17, Issue 17 Poetry, Poetry

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.

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

April 11, 2019 Interviews

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.

Holiday in Queens

December 19, 2018 Dispatches

By SUSAN HARLAN

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.

November 2018 Poetry Feature: New York Elegies

November 30, 2018 Poetry, Translation

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.

The First Day of Fall

November 7, 2018 Dispatches

By SHANE CASHMAN

Highland Falls, NY

A black ant walks across the kitchen counter and I try to flick it away. It dodges my finger, but it’s miscalculated how close it is to the edge and falls off the cliff of the counter and into the dog bowl. It struggles to swim. The ant is dying the way I always die in my worst dreams. In nightmares I sink to the bottom of the lake near my childhood home.

To The Women Who Feel It In Their Bones

October 29, 2018 Issue 16, Issue 16 Poetry, Poetry

By PEGGY ROBLES-ALVARADO

Excerpt from a speech given by Don Pedro Albizu Campos, Ponce, Puerto Rico, October 12, 1933:

A people’s sense of unity has to come from women … the woman nurtures the unity of a race, the unity of a civilization, the unity of a people … Puerto Rico will be free, Puerto Rico will be sovereign and independent when the Puerto Rican woman feels free, sovereign and independent. And for the Puerto Rican woman to achieve this unity, she has to feel it in her bones…

When Weathermen Insist Storms are Feminine

October 29, 2018 Issue 16, Issue 16 Poetry, Poetry

By PEGGY ROBLES-ALVARADO

they say it’s because they are hard to predict
and even harder to forget

their naming ceremony broadcasted over live feeds, satellite images
insisting she settles on the tongues of both faithful and atheist

The Puerto Rican Day Parade, Celebrating Heritage in Mourning

October 29, 2018 Essays, Issue 16, Issue 16 Essays, Translation

By CARMEN GRACIELA DÍAZ

Translated by MARÍA JOSÉ GIMÉNEZ

June 10, 2018

New York City

This year, the Puerto Rican flag wore black. Only the white star remained. Seeing it dressed in mourning, it was impossible not to feel a knot from your chest to your gut.

Four Poems from New York City

September 5, 2018 Dispatches

By SEAN SINGER

Photo by Robert Frank (1947)

New York City, NY

Floating

Today in the taxi I brought the famous jazz drummer’s wife, Elena, all around Harlem doing errands. Cobb is the last surviving member of the band that recorded Kind of Blue. We went to the bank and to the pharmacy. She let loose with some stories. It was as if his music was not alone waking up from its dream.

On Zoos

August 8, 2018 Dispatches

By HANNAH GERSEN

The Bronx, New York

The tiger was showing off, pacing alongside his swimming pond, looking as if he might jump in at any moment. His long tailed curled inquisitively, like a housecat’s. At least twenty people held up phones to capture the moment on video. My five-year-old son stood by the glass divider, watching, rapt. Several feet away, holding my seven-month-old baby girl, I observed the tiger’s pixelated clones prowling across tiny screens.

All posts tagged: New York

The Aladdin Hotel, Woodbourne, NY

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

Holiday in Queens

November 2018 Poetry Feature: New York Elegies

The First Day of Fall

To The Women Who Feel It In Their Bones

When Weathermen Insist Storms are Feminine

The Puerto Rican Day Parade, Celebrating Heritage in Mourning

Four Poems from New York City

On Zoos

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