For A Secret Grievance…

EMILIA PARDO BAZÁN
And it did indeed rival them. The large glass windows, the white marble display cases, the gleaming scales, the gilded brass taps, the wood-paneled ceiling, the banquettes lined with plush, green Utrecht velvet, the sparkling tins of canned food stacked in pyramids

Contrail across blue sky

July 2025 Poetry Feature: New Poems by our Contributors

GEOFFREY BROCK
Sing, O furrow-browed youth, / of the contrails scoring the sky, / bright as lines of cocaine / until, as they age, the eye // loses them to the blue… / Sing of the thin-skinned plane / that made those ephemeral clouds, / and of all that each contains: // the countless faceless strangers

Cover of All Is The Telling by Rosa Castellano

An Embodied Sense of Time: Raychelle Heath Interviews Rosa Castellano

ROSA CASTELLANO
I’m holding a blank page all the time for myself. That’s a truth that I choose to believe in: the blank page is a tool for our collective liberation. It can be how we keep going. I love that we can find each other on the page and heal each other, too. So, I invoke that again and again, for myself, because I need it.

Long wooden table with chairs. Plants in the background.

Four Ways of Setting the Table

CLARA CHIU
We are holding the edges of the fabric, / throwing the center into the air. / & even in dusk this cloth / billowing over our heads / makes a souvenir of home: / mother & child in snowglobe. / Yet we are warm here, beneath / this dome, & what light slips through / drapes the dining room white.

Book cover of Stranger than fiction by Edwin Frank

Main Character Syndrome: A Review of Stranger Than Fiction

Review by JULIA LICHTBLAU
Frank weaves the lives and work of thirty writers who redefined the novel, the era, and themselves into a story, each in their own way struggling with how to write amid previously unthinkable possibilities unleashed by violence and technology on society, sexuality, and language.

Using The Common in my first-year seminars has been fun, fruitful, and helpfully startling for these classes.”

—Martha Cooley, Associate Professor of English, Adelphi University Receive classroom subscription discounts, lesson plans, and more when you TEACH THE COMMON »

From the beginning, The Common has brought you transportive writing and exciting new voices. We are committed to supporting writers and maintaining free, unrestricted access to our website, but we can’t do it without you. Become an integral part of our global community of readers and writers by donating today. No amount is too small. Thank you!

Home