You’ve heard the good news — The Common is celebrating 15 years in 2025. Now here’s the best part: we’re throwing a party in New York, and you’re invited! Join us for an evening of refreshments, conversation, and mingling in honor of our 15th year in print.
In poet JULY WESTHALE’s upcoming book, moon moon, humanity finds itself in a precarious position—Earth has become unlivable, forcing people to seek refuge elsewhere. But when the moon proves overcrowded, humanity pushes even further, settling on the mysterious and perhaps astronomically dubious moon’s moon. Part modern epic, part ecological elegy, the collection tackles eco-grief, climate change, and human hubris, all while weaving humor throughout its poetic narrative.
July Westhale, whose earlier books include the autobiographical exploration of class warfare in California, Trailer Trash, and the intense poetic meditation on desire and divinity, Via Negativa (praised as “stunning” by Publishers Weekly), brings their signature incisiveness and wit to this timely new work. They also released the recent Unmade Hearts: My Sor Juana, a delicious translation of the work of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.
Today, Westhale converses with poet BOSTON GORDON, author of Glory Holes and the forthcoming Loose Bricks. Gordon, who also champions queer and trans voices through Philadelphia’s acclaimed “You Can’t Kill A Poet” reading series, guides this thoughtful discussion as they delve into meditations on writing, the moon, and what poetry teaches us about ourselves.
You can pre-order moon moon here.
The man’s face is gone. Gone the others circled around him in the hut, gone the clang of cowry shells (were they cowry shells?) gathered around their ankles, gone the hut. Gone the ochre-red soil on which the hut was built. All that’s left is the fabric the man, who was a chief, was wearing. The blue of it—a blue so rich it throbbed.
Indigo doesn’t just dye a surface. It gives depth.
while driving today to pick up groceries
I drive over the bridge where it would be
so easy to drive right off the water
a blanket to lay over my head its fevers
By PRIA ANAND
The elephant-headed boy was born with the head of a boy.
“I had been expecting you for years,” his mother told him. “By the time you were born, you could practically walk.”
By HISHAM BUSTANI
Translated by NARIMAN YOUSSEF
Amman is not incidental. The sayl, the stream that patiently carved a path between seven hills for thousands of years, drew—as waterways often do—the din of life. It was somewhere close to here that the Ain Ghazal statues were found. Nine thousand years old, captivating in their simplicity, they seem to be about to speak as you contemplate their black-tar eyes, the details of their fine features, their square torsos and solid limbs.
By ERICA DAWSON
The month is February and that means
nothing because winter in Tampa is
the same as fall and spring so it could’ve
been easily Thoreau’s “September sun”
or Eliot’s “April is” blah blah blah.
By MARIAH RIGG
Fifty-eight years before Harrison’s granddaughter is born, the U.S. government drops a two-thousand-pound bomb on the island of Kaho‘olawe. It is 1948. On Maui, the shock from the bomb is so strong that it shatters the glass of the living room window, and Harrison, a baby still in his crib, starts wailing in time with the family mutt.
According to rule. The terrible safeguard
of the text when placed against the granite
ledge into which our industry inscribed
itself. We were prying choice from the jaws
of poverty, from the laws of poverty.
By ALA JANBEK
Translated by ADDIE LEAK
Amman was culture, colorful walls, and distant souqs in the old city where Mama tried to buy everything we needed in one trip. Na’ur was where my grandfather built the mill near a spring, where our home by the hill watches the sun set behind Palestine, far from the chaos of the valley.
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