By MARA PASTOR
Translated by MARÍA JOSÉ GIMÉNEZ
She asked me for an ice cream machine.
When she said it her collarbones were pronounced.
They were beginning to wilt,
but her skin was the flesh of coconut itself.
This month The Common offers a selection of poems from the anthology Making Mirrors: Writing/Righting by and for Refugees, forthcoming in November from Olive Branch Press, an imprint of Interlink Publishing Group.
A POETRY ANTHOLOGY THAT ILLUMINATES EXILE AND DISPLACEMENT
Making Mirrors began on two continents, envisioned by Palestinian poet and aid worker, Jehan Bseiso, and Becky Thompson, a US-based poet changed by months of greeting refugees after their perilous journey across the Aegean Sea.
This anthology uses mirrors to reflect imagistic connections that allow us to see ourselves in each other, those on rafts and those standing on the shore, those waiting/writing in detention and those writing from places of relative safety, those who lift their children to the sky and those whose bodies are at the bottom of the sea.
In that year of a shot to the head where were you the first time you broke night?
When you break night, you learn that one puff, under the right circumstance, can give you the right perspective.
You learn to pick up stories that fall & slip on the right side of knowing.
Poems from Available Light: New and Selected Poems
By CP SURENDRAN
In advance of the U.S. publication of AVAILABLE LIGHT: New and Selected Poems (forthcoming from MadHat Press), we welcome CP Surendran to The Common.
NEHA KIRPAL interviews CHANDRAHAS CHOUDHURY
Chandrahas Choudhury is a novelist and columnist based in New Delhi. His first novel Arzee the Dwarf was shortlisted for the Commonwealth First Book Prize and chosen by World Literature Today as one of “60 Essential English-Language Works of Modern Indian Literature.” Choudhury is also the editor of India: A Traveler’s Literary Companion.
Released by Simon & Schuster this year, Clouds is Choudhury’s second novel. While fictional, the book weaves in topical themes of religion, democracy, and politics in India.
Via email, Neha Kirpal recently spoke with Choudhury about the people and places that influenced Clouds’ narrative and characters, his obsession with clouds, and a recent mango trail he undertook across the subcontinent.
By J.D. HO
What is above is as that which is below, and what is below is as that which is above.
— principle of alchemy
Excerpt from the novel by W. F. HERMANS
Translated from the Dutch by DAVID COLMER
I went out the back door, across the marble terrace and down into the garden, as I had done so many times before. I looked up at the two windows I had calculated as belonging to the locked room. There was nothing to see. As always, they were covered with blackout paper. Nothing had changed. Walking back and forth, I studied all of the protrusions on the back wall: window frames, downpipes. I couldn’t see any way of climbing up without a ladder. It wasn’t even possible to reach them from the window of another room.
Book by WILLA CARROLL
Reviewed by ANDREA JURJEVIĆ
Willa Carroll was an experimental dancer and actor before turning to poetry, and many of the poems of her remarkable debut collection, Nerve Chorus, revolve around performance and the body. Her work reminds us that much of our experience transcends our verbal abilities. With personal subject matter and elegant, yet accessible, philosophical explorations, Carroll succeeds in maintaining a strong tonal unity and distinct lyricism. Like experimental dance, these poems invite a visceral experience. Meanwhile, they should be admired for their lyrical flexibility, the exactness of their imagery, their life-affirming quality, as well as their intellectual engagement. Though this is her first collection, Carroll’s poems have garnered attention for some time. She won Tupelo Quarterly’s TQ7 Prize for her poem “Chorus of Omissions,” and her piece “No Final Curtain” won First Place in Narrative Magazine’s Third Annual Poetry Contest.
MELODY NIXON interviews IRIS MARTIN COHEN
Iris Martin Cohen’s debut novel is a witty, incisive, and very funny send up of New York City literary circles and the ambition that drives them. The Common’s Interviews Editor Melody Nixon spoke with Cohen this month about The Little Clan, New York high society, contemporary American male writers and their pitfalls, the female socialite ideal, and, you know, what to do about patriarchal capitalism.
New poems by our contributors, ERICA EHRENBERG and SEBASTIAN MATTHEWS
The Toy Lamb
It was the limpness that I loved,
the way it dangled
even when it was sitting,
when it was as low down
as it possibly could be against the line
of gravity,
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