We are stretching towards each other,
words tangling. The words can’t always
be torn apart. Sometimes you
are ти. Sometimes we touch.
Watch the poet read from this piece at our Issue 28 launch party:
“Happy and furry?” she inquires,
of the TV—
but I’ve tuned out. Uh-oh, this may be
tough to unriddle. When you’re eighty-three,
as she is, with creeping dementia—all
sorts of imponderables float by,
and everything the more inscrutable
By AMY STUBER
Alice wants to walk on the trail, but Renee wants to wander. At least that’s what I imagine.
Maybe Alice tells Renee, “It takes two hours to get to the lake. Let’s keep moving,” and probably Renee heads down offshoot paths to get closer to the falls. In the first half-hour, on their way to the lake at the peak, they see a fox, a mother and baby moose, and three animatronic-looking deer.
This piece is part of a special portfolio featuring new and queer voices from China. Read more from the portfolio here.
By WU WENYING, SU SHI, SHANGYANG FANG, YUN QIN WANG, and CAO COLLECTIVE.
Translated poems appear in both the original Chinese and in English.
Table of Contents:
This event has passed, but you can watch a recording of it below, or here on YouTube!
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!
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.
ADRIE KUSSEROW and LEAH ZANI are a rare sort: trained cultural anthropologists and poets, anthro-poets. The two met while Adrie was judging the Ethnographic Poetry Prize, the world’s only prize for poetry written by anthropologists. Shortly after, they began working together on the editorial team of Anthropology and Humanism, one of the few peer-reviewed academic journals that accepts poetry.
In this interview, Leah Zani connects with Kusserow about her latest memoir, The Trauma Mantras: A Memoir in Prose Poems (Duke University Press, 2024), a collection of prose poems based on Kusserow’s experiences with refugee communities and humanitarian projects in Nepal, India, Bhutan, Uganda, South Sudan, and the United States. In this conversation, they discuss the lyricism of suffering and the role of poetry in enriching deep anthropological understandings of place.
By JADE SONG
Hu Tianbao waves to asphalt and sky. The bumper of his mother’s car has long since exited the drop-off zone, yet he still stands moving his arm in the building’s entrance doorway. Left right left right dawdles his hand. A farewell to punctuality. He’s alone, everyone else already nestled in their classrooms, reciting poems.
By TREY MOODY
My grandmother likes to tell me dogs
understand everything you say, they just can’t
say anything back. We’re eating spaghetti
while I visit from far away. My grandmother
just turned ninety-four and tells me dogs
understand everything you say, they just can’t
If you ever want to feel real,
even important,
cry on the street.
Sob. Heave. Bum a half-smoked cigarette.
Longing to make his life compact as sushi, my shame
borrows the saint’s apron, shackles his swivel in her cincture. My shame
walks the earth with an electric blanket, goes to the gym to window-shop with
it, heads for the hills where he takes selfies meditating. To the person
on the bus who inquires, my shame
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