Reviews

Review: Dispersals: On Plants, Borders, and Belonging

April 29, 2024 Reviews

By JESSICA J. LEE
Reviewed by KATIE NOAH GIBSON

“These are essays written for a world in motion,” writes Jessica J. Lee in the introduction to her exquisite, haunting third book, Dispersals: On Plants, Borders, and Belonging, a collection of 14 essays examining the movement—voluntary, forced and accidental—of people and plants across landscapes. Writing in a time of massive global migration, and having experienced several recent upheavals in her own life (including motherhood and the COVID-19 pandemic), Lee considers terms like rooted and migration in light of economic structures, political power, and her own Welsh-Taiwanese-Canadian ancestry. She probes, researches, and even delights in the ways in which plants—seeds, trees, rhizomes—consistently defy human notions of borders and boundaries.

Through the Lens of the Littoral: A Review of Ralph Sneeden’s The Legible Element

March 4, 2024 Reviews

By RALPH SNEEDEN
Reviewed By MATT W. MILLER

Narratively driven and lyrically evocative, The Legible Element by Ralph Sneeden is a collection of personal essays that threads stories of surfing, sailing, teaching, fishing, and even pond hockey through deep meditations about adolescence, fatherhood, marriage, family, aging, and the natural world. A kind of memoir-in-essays, the book uses these experiences and the vehicle of the “I” as a way to explore a life lived by and for water.

Review: American Gospel

February 5, 2024 Reviews

By MIAH JEFFRA
Review by YELENA FURMAN

The city as a character in its own right is a frequent device in otherwise disparate novels. In Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion (1987), a water-shimmering, pleasure-seeking Venice forms the fabric of the female protagonist’s life. Andrei Bely’s modernist tour-de-force Petersburg (1916), following a long tradition in Russian literature, portrays this city as both the site and driver of the action. For the navel-gazing narrator of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913-1927), Paris and other locations in France are integral sources of his copious memories. The commonality among such city-infused works is the reputation of said cities: world-renowned and possessed of their own symbolic capital and literary mythology. The associations are not always positive—writers often portray big cities as dirty, oppressive, even demonic—but the cities historically portrayed in literature are famed embodiments of grandeur and stature.

Review: Happy by Celina Baljeet Basra

January 22, 2024 Reviews

By CELINA BALJEET BASRA

Review by MELISSA HOLBROOK PIERSON

Everything about Happy Singh Soni, the titular hero of Celina Baljeet Basra’s stinging first novel, is unlikely. He is the son of Punjabi cabbage farmers, but he fancies himself a screenwriter and prospective movie actor in the mold of Nouvelle Vague darling Sami Frey. (Indeed, he has effectively memorized Godard’s Bande à part.) He imagines his future in a Europe of all the classic allures, living in an elegant stone house with a yellow door; he is all about the details, which are uniformly sensual and full of wonder to him. Even as a child on his parents’ modest farm, he begins practicing for the day when his public utterances will be sought after by the press, so he invents a series he titles “The Loo Interviews,” conducted by an eager reporter for the gossipy Jodhpur News . . . while he occupies the privy.

He is in exuberant love with all he experiences, especially his mother’s adoringly proffered fried treats. Happy even appreciates the pests that afflict the surrounding farmland that is slowly being consumed by the amoeba of a badly managed Disneyland knockoff called Wonderland, where he takes a desultory job in which his nascent talents are ignored. He is the kind of imaginative soul who can’t help but personify even the stars in the sky (“Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde”).

Review: Landscapes

December 19, 2023 Reviews

By CHRISTINE LAI
Reviewed by S. ELIZABETH SIGLER

The walls of the art gallery behind the rotunda are lined with large paintings of gods and goddesses that loom above the viewer, giving the sense that the mythological figures are larger than life. On its own wall—separate from its goddess-themed counterparts—is an 1817 oil painting by Jacques-Louis David. “Cupid and Psyche” is an arresting image that shows a teenage Cupid smirking at viewers—like he’s letting them in on a joke—as he tosses an arm over Psyche. Both of the painting’s subjects are fully naked. Psyche is asleep, so the viewer can only guess how she would feel if she were to realize how Cupid is showing off his “sexual conquest” by slinging his arm between her breasts.

Review: Never Be A Punching Bag For Nobody

December 5, 2023 Reviews

Film by NAOMI YANG

Review by HANNAH GERSEN

Sometimes visiting a new neighborhood can change your life. While scouting locations for a fashion shoot, filmmaker Naomi Yang happened upon a boxing gym in East Boston. The modest second-generation family business, with its sparring ring and wall of framed black-and-white photographs depicting local boxers, seemed like a great backdrop. Unfortunately, the gym’s owner and head coach, Sal Bartolo, Jr., disagreed, citing aprevious photo shoot that had gone badly, with high heels destroying his mats. There would be no fashion shoots in his gym. Instead, he gave Yang his pitch to all visitors, telling her to come back for a free boxing lesson. In voiceover, Yang confides to us that she did not take the offer seriously and didn’t plan to return. And yet, a few weeks later, she did. Part of her was holding out hope that Bartolo would change his mind. But another part felt drawn to boxing, and Bartolo’s gym would soon become the center of her life. Yang’s documentary tells the story of how this chance meeting at a boxing gym brought her into a deeper understanding of herself, and of the ways bullying forces can leave their mark on places as well as people.

Friday Reads: October/November 2023

November 3, 2023 Reviews

Curated by OLIVE AMDUR

As this week of costumes, candy, and spooky Halloween cheer comes to an end, we at The Common are gearing up for the launch of our fall issue! Issue 26—full of vivid poems and prose from all over the world, as well as a special portfolio of writing and art from the migrant farmworker community—launches this coming Monday. After a brief Friday Reads hiatus, to get you excited about the issue, we return this month with recommendations from Issue 26 contributors Ned Balbo and Nora Rodriguez Camagna. Keep reading to see what’s been on their shelves this fall!

Review: Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare

August 28, 2023 Reviews

By MEGAN KAMALEI KAKIMOTO
Reviewed by MARIAH RIGG

A mentor once told me, “you write to the places you are not,” and I think that is true for not only what I write, but also what I read. Since moving to the Southeast U.S., with its millennia-old forests and rolling thunderstorms, I’ve taken to reading about the places I’ve come from: Oregon, Southern California, and the islands upon which I was born and raised, the place where my family has lived as settlers for over three generations—Hawaiʻi.

Review: Poems of Encounter in Dipika Mukherjee’s Dialect of Distant Harbors

July 31, 2023 Reviews

By DIPIKA MUKHERJEE
Reviewed by LYNNE MCENIRY

“Tell me the landscape in which you live and I will tell you who you are,” suggests philosopher José Ortega y Gasset. Based on her collection Dialect of Distant Harbors, Dipika Mukherjee would agree, I believe, but “landscapes” here would have to be plural, because in addition to geographical landscapes, these poems embrace multiple settings, languages, weather, generations, relationships, and traditions and rituals, both spiritual and secular. Through experiences both lived and dreamed, her poems invite the reader to discover beauty, danger, and heartbreak by exploring new worlds and revealing heart-stopping moments of intimacy. The harbors she describes are distant but never forgotten, both welcoming and estranging.

Although they are not named or numbered, we can see by the choice of extra spacing between each group of five to seven poems in the table of contents that Mukherjee has created seven sections for this collection. Throughout the book, each section is separated by a graceful lotus mandala, similar to those that adorn sacred texts and women’s hands hennaed for special occasions. These seven symbolic pauses serve as a constant reminder of the overarching message of healing, resilience, and rebirth in all the poems carefully gathered here. They also invite the reader to pay special attention to seven central themes: generational roots, the misogyny and physical torture women suffer, the passing of time, the horrific violence of racial and cultural hate, mortality, migration and exile, and the value of travel.

Friday Reads: July 2023

July 7, 2023 Reviews

Curated by SOFIA BELIMOVA and OLIVE AMDUR

The fireworks have finally quieted down, but July has just begun to heat up! Whether you are looking for a book to help you forget the hot weather or a book filled with just as many vivid sensations as the summer season is, keep on reading. In this month’s Friday Reads feature, three of our interns recommend dynamic stories about the nightclubs of the Midwest, a boarding school in coastal Rhode Island, and the tangled relationships of a young person’s body and spirits.