Sarah Wu

Excerpt from Imagine a City: A Pilot’s Journey Across the Urban World

February 17, 2023 Essays, Nonfiction

This piece is excerpted from Imagine a City: A Pilot’s Journey Across the Urban World by Mark Vanhoenacker, a guest at Amherst College’s 2023 LitFest. Register for this exciting celebration of Amherst’s literary life.

Autumn 1987

I’m thirteen. It’s after school. I’m in my room, at my desk. I look out of the window over the drive and towards the garage. It’s late autumn and it’s almost dark outside. There’s frost in the corners of the window and snow is falling.

I look across the room, at the light-up globe on my dresser. I go to it, flip the switch on its cord and watch as the darkened sphere turns blue in the failing light and starts to shine as if it were in space.

I return to my desk. I sit down, pick up my pencil with my left hand and rest its tip on the sheet of graph paper. I love airplanes and cities and so, not for the first time, I’ve drawn a simple map of the world. I’ll draw a line that begins in one city and ends in another. But which city to start from?

Finding One’s Way Through Bewilderment: Virginia Konchan interviews Nathan McClain

January 16, 2023 Interviews

In this interview, VIRGINIA KONCHAN talks with NATHAN McCLAIN about his second full-length collection, Previously Owned. Touching on process and craft, literary influence, racial justice, and faith, this rich conversation celebrates the range of McClain’s poetry and the sense of history and place in his work.

January 2023 Poetry Feature

January 13, 2023 Poetry

New poems by our contributors TINA CANE, MYRONN HARDY, and MARC VINCENZ

Table of Contents:

            Tina Cane
                        —You Are Now Interacting as Yourself
                        —The Subject Line

Myronn Hardy
—Among Asters

Marc Vincenz
—An Empire in the Ground

You Are Now Interacting As Yourself
By TINA CANE

Sheila had IHOP     delivered to her apartment     in El Alto, NY
on January 6th     so she could kick back     self-proclaimed terrorist
that she is     and eat pancakes     while watching white supremacists
storm the Capital on T.V.     a coup

Crawl Space

January 12, 2023 Essays

By MELANIE S. SMITH

I.

The basement crawl space is tinged with dread. And a little bit of pride too. Because both my late husband John and my father—and even the firefighter I had to call when it flooded—hated the idea of having to go in. The dimly lit space is only eighteen inches high, a tight spot for a grown man, and full of spider webs. The floor is dirt; overhead is crumbled fiberglass insulation. You climb a ladder and go through a small rough hole in the house’s fieldstone foundation, then crawl about seven feet to reach the valve that supplies water to the outside faucet. This needs to be turned on in spring and off in late fall so the pipes don’t freeze and burst. To get out, you have to crawl backwards and reach a foot through the rough hole, searching blindly for the top step of the ladder. That last six inches is hell on the knees, all sharp rock and crumbling mortar.

Review: God’s Children Are Little Broken Things

December 22, 2022 Reviews

By ARINZE IFEAKANDU
Reviewed by JULIA LICHTBLAU

Though I’d heard Arinze Ifeakandu read from his debut collection, God’s Children Are Little Broken Things, at its launch at Greenlight Books in Brooklyn in June 2022, I was unprepared for the force and distinctiveness of his writing when I opened the book. Soft-voiced and diffident, Ifeakandu seemed overshadowed that night by his effusive interviewer, Brandon Taylor, who hailed his arrival as a new gay Nigerian writer and fellow graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop on the literary scene. The stories in Ifeakandu’s collection merit reading for their subtle explorations of the nuances and hazards of living as a gay person in Nigeria, where open homosexuality is subject to federal criminal penalties and punishable by stoning in some states.

Permission to Dream Forth: An Interview with Arisa White

December 12, 2022 Interviews

JULY WESTHALE interviews ARISA WHITE

In Arisa White’s lyrical memoir, Who’s Your Daddy, she writes of her father’s absence throughout her coming-of-age in tender, genre-bending poems. July Westhale and Arisa White, former teaching colleagues and Bay Area community, approached this interview in an epistolary way, discussing form, family, voice, and taking up space on the page.

Klan Giant

November 21, 2022 Issue 24, Issue 24 Poetry, Poetry

By TOMMYE BLOUNT

“Made of Duretta cloth and sateen, embroidered in silk.
Cotton cord and tassels. Price, each $6.00″
—from Catalogue of Official Robes and Banners, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan

Look up here, the air is Aryan. The moon,
our white hood. Our life must loom large
above that which is darkened in our shadow.
A fate loomed long ago, ours

Cheetos and Rimbaud: An Interview with Tina Cane

November 14, 2022 Interviews

MATT W. MILLER interviews TINA CANE

Tina Cane’s Year of the Murder Hornet was published in spring of 2022 by Veliz Books. In this interview, Tina discusses her new collection with Matt Miller. Threaded through by grit and lyrical beauty, the book weaves survival, strength, and hope out of this pitched moment of American politics, the Coronavirus pandemic, and popular culture.

Perfect Storms

October 31, 2022 Essays, Issue 24, Issue 24 Essays, Podcasts & Audio

By ALEXANDRA TEAGUE

The Common Magazine · “Perfect Storms” by Alexandra Teague

The Jungle Cruise

My mother and I are on a chlorinated river that’s somehow simultaneously the Amazon, Congo, and Nile, floating languidly so we don’t run into the boat in front of us and “don’t scare the wildlife”: the kind of joke the Disney guide, in his safari hat and over-pocketed explorer outfit, keeps making.

Iceberg, Mine

October 31, 2022 Fiction, Issue 24, Issue 24 Fiction

By GERARDO SÁMANO CÓRDOVA

We called him Ísjaki. Few knew his real name. I certainly didn’t when I was charged with being his caretaker during his first visit to New York. Ísjaki meant “iceberg” in Iceland, where this man came from.