New work from ELIZABETH METZGER, MATT W. MILLER, ANNIE SCHUMACHER, and MARC VINCENZ.
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This piece is excerpted from The Math of Saint Felix, a poetry collection by Diane Exavier ’09. Exavier will be a guest at Amherst College’s LitFest 2025, an exciting, 10th-anniversary celebration of Amherst’s literary legacy and life. Register here.
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Retold by ILAN STAVANS
Nezahualcóyotl (1402–1472) is the only pre-Hispanic Aztec poet we know by name. The word means “Hungry Coyote” in Nahuatl. But Nezahualcóyotl wasn’t solely a poet. He ruled the Texcocans, who, along with the city-states Tenochtitlán and Tlacopán, formed the magisterial Triple Alliance, which ruled from 1428 until the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors almost a hundred years later. Nezahualcóyotl was also known for his philosophical meditations, his urban projects, especially aqueducts, and for his views on war, sacrifice, and the legal system.
By BRANDON SOM
This piece is excerpted from Brandon Som’s Tripas, which won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Som will be a guest at Amherst College’s LitFest 2025, an exciting, 10th-anniversary celebration of Amherst’s literary legacy and life. Register here.
ANTENNA
Tuning not lute but car radio, Cocteau’s Orpheus copies the
broadcasts from a netherworld for verses—
By JINJIN XU
These poems are excerpted from the published work of JinJin Xu ’17, a guest at Amherst College’s LitFest 2025. Register for this exciting, 10th-anniversary celebration of Amherst’s literary legacy and life.
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Amherst College’s tenth annual literary festival runs from Thursday, February 27 to Sunday, March 2. Among the guests is PAISLEY REKDAL, whose book West: A Translation was longlisted for the National Book Award. The Common is pleased to reprint a short selection of video poems from West here.
Join Paisley Rekdal and Brandom Som in conversation with host Ruth Dickey, Executive Director of the National Book Foundation, on Sunday, March 2 at 2pm.
Register and see the full list of LitFest events here.
Not
What Day
Heroic
Paisley Rekdal is the author of four books of nonfiction and seven books of poetry, most recently West: A Translation, which won the 2024 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and was longlisted for the National Book Award. The former Utah poet laureate, she teaches at the University of Utah, where she directs the American West Center.
By KRIKOR BELEDIAN
Translated by CHRISTOPHER MILLIS and TALINE VOSKERITCHIAN
Piece appears below in English and the original Armenian.
Translators’ Note
The pervasive sense of place in Krikor Beledian’s works was forged in the crucible of displacement. Beledian grew up in the Beirut neighborhood of Hayashen, which was home to the waves of refugees from the Armenian genocide that Armenians refer to as the Catastrophe.
The pre-eminent writer of Western Armenian literature, Beledian is a long-time resident of Paris, where he has authored more than 30 volumes, including poetry, a 10-volume novel cycle still in progress, literary criticism, experimental prose, and literary history. And he has done so in the UNESCO-designated “endangered” language of Western Armenian.
“Mantra 5” is one of the 32 extended poems collected in Mantras. Beledian says that Mantra 5 was written from the tip of the Seine isle of Vert Gallant, which looks toward the Louvre and the metallic bridge of Pont des Arts. From this vantage point, the poem brings into its sphere multiple and often contradictory threads which are simultaneously at play, resulting in a fractured surface. Time and geography are superimposed on each other; just as the ruins of Palmyra appear in the Louvre, the shadowy dead of indeterminate origin course through the currents of the Seine and the Euphrates. The poem is both atonal dirge and palimpsest.
In the Preface to Mantras, Beledian writes that “place is exile, and exile is the original catastrophe.” The challenge of translating Beledian’s writing is its radical tenuousness—of place, time, and language itself. This is a complex undertaking because Western Armenian belongs to a culture nearly obliterated in 1915, a Catastrophe bookended by centuries of displacement. English, particularly American English, belongs to the culture of conquest and certainty: How to render into English a poetic language which is acutely aware of its calamitous biography, its indeterminate attributes, and its mandate to give voice to the unspoken, unseen, unknown?
— Christopher Millis and Taline Voskeritchian
Poems by RAFAEL ALBERTI
Translated from the Spanish by JOHN MURILLO
From Rafael Alberti’s Concerning the Angels, forthcoming in March from Four Way Books.
Poems appear in both English and Spanish.
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This month we welcome back TC stalwart BRAD LEITHAUSER, who honors us with new work, including the title poem of his new collection from Knopf, The Old Current.
—John Hennesy
New work by LEAH FLAX BARBER, ROBERT CORDING, PETER FILKINS
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In Beaufort
By Robert Cording
At a rented air B&B, I am sitting on a swing
placed here just for me it seems,
or just to carry off my worries and sorrows
as I rock slowly, back and forth, taking in
the shifting colors of the Broad River that circles
this marsh pocketed with cut-outs of water
and long inlets that circle round and round
as if it were one of those spiritual labyrinths
that bring calm as the center is reached.
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Celebrating 15 Years