Sarah Wu

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.

Charcoal

October 31, 2022 Issue 24, Issue 24 Poetry, Poetry

By TOMMYE BLOUNT

lit by her fire, I was the scorched
tree Clare West found

direction by; a swiftly drawn arrow
became a drawn hood; an era gone

Terror

October 31, 2022 Issue 24, Issue 24 Poetry, Poetry

By TOMMYE BLOUNT

“Made of cotton Jeans, red cotton cord
and one cotton tassel. Price, each $5.00″

—from Catalogue of Official Robes and Banners, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan

Inside the discourse, our course—the walk
in the tattle, the footwork goose stepped

Nine Twelve Poem

October 31, 2022 Issue 24, Issue 24 Poetry, Poetry

By ANACAONA ROCIO MILAGRO

Dedicated to Reina Yolanda Burdie

I was in Egypt nine months before the towers fell.
The people spoke to me in Arabic Roh Rohi
but I spoke back in English so they called me “American”
/I never called myself American.
America never called me American – not without a hyphen.