New poems by STEVEN LEYVA and ELIZABETH SCANLON
Table of contents:
Steven Leyva
Elizabeth Scanlon
The Upper West Side, Manhattan, New York
On a crisp fall day in 1974, you are walking with your third-grade class up Central Park West to the museum. You smell the hot pretzels just before the statue comes into view. You want to pass by quickly in an effort to avoid the poop from flocking pigeons, but your best friend and partner for the trip, who is white and blond, slows your pace and squeezes your hand. She is frowning up at the statue, red-cheeked, the way she gets when she is angry.
“How come the Black man and the Indian man don’t get horses too? They’re just as good as the white guy.”
This is the third in a series of features highlighting the Black writers our editors and staff have been reading. To read The Common’s statement in support of the nationwide protests against anti-Black racism, white supremacy, and police brutality, click here.
Recommendations: Newcomer Can’t Swim by Renee Gladman, The Book of Delights by Ross Gay, White Girls by Hilton Als
Newcomer Can’t Swim by Renee Gladman
Recommended by Elizabeth Witte, Associate Editor
Renee Gladman’s Newcomer Can’t Swim is a sort of linguo-geographical exploration of place (cityscape, restaurant, beach, etc.,) and of the characters, the voices that populate these places, that move through, and act or are acted upon within each scene.
By VAL WANG
“John jumped.”
I had no idea what the short sentence meant, only that it came from the Bible and when I said it, all the other campers in my Bible study group laughed and I was off the hook for answering any more questions about God, Jesus, Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, none of which I knew anything about.
This is the first installment of an online series highlighting work by Black authors published in The Common. To read The Common’s statement in support of the nationwide protests against anti-Black racism, white supremacy, and police brutality, click here.
New poems by LOREN GOODMAN
Please welcome back long-time TC contributor Loren Goodman.
Table of Contents:
—G-d in a Cup
—Dear Jeremy
—Due to the Light
—Dolphin Facts
Loren Goodman was born in Kansas and studied in New York, Tucson, Buffalo and Kobe. He is the author of Famous Americans, selected by W.S. Merwin for the 2002 Yale Series of Younger Poets, and Non-Existent Facts (otata’s bookshelf, 2018), as well as the chapbooks Suppository Writing (The Chuckwagon, 2008), New Products (Proper Tales Press, 2010) and, with Pirooz Kalayeh, Shitting on Elves & Other Poems (New Michigan Press, 2020). A Professor of Creative Writing and English Literature at Yonsei University/Underwood International College in Seoul, Korea, he serves as the Chair of Comparative Literature and Culture and Creative Writing Director.
Book by CLARE BEAMS
Review by ETHAN CHATAGNIER
The events of Clare Beams’ debut novel, The Illness Lesson, start with the founding of a school for girls in 19th-century New England, but the novel begins just before that with an omen. A flock of mysterious red birds visits the Massachusetts estate of Samuel Hood for the first time since the collapse of his previous social experiment decades earlier, a failed agricultural commune called the Birch Hill Consociation. Some find the birds beautiful, but to Samuel’s daughter, Caroline, their “shape might be a red so bright and so unexpected, so unlike the colors of her life, that it held a violence.” Samuel is a noted idealist in the tradition of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and he, Caroline, and his acolyte David live off the income of his Transcendentalist essays. The girls’ school is an attempt to prove his latest hypothesis: that girls can be ushered into the world of ideas as easily as boys.
Music by ABRAHAM KATZ
Northern Israel-Palestine
The chunk of the ball
On the cracked blacktop
And our torsos so covered
In sweat nearby the sea
Swells and the smell seeps
Into our hair and the air
This is the second in a series of features highlighting the Black writers our editors and staff have been reading. To read The Common’s statement in support of the nationwide protests against anti-Black racism, white supremacy, and police brutality, click here.
Recommendations: Kingdom Animalia by Aracelis Girmay, Neon Vernacular by Yusef Komunyakaa, I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood by Tiana Clark.
Poetry by GEORGE SEFERIS
Translated from Modern Greek by JENNIFER R. KELLOGG
Poems appear in both English and Modern Greek
Translator’s Statement
These two poems by George Seferis explore the disorienting confusion and fear that arises from living through war and catastrophe. Seferis spent his life as a spokesman for the Greek state and Hellenic culture, working as a career diplomat and poet. He lived through the Balkan Wars, World Wars I & II, and the Greek Civil War as well as continual political crisis.
His poetry interprets Greece’s contemporary tragedies as the result of a mythical hubris, especially internecine murder in the heroic past. Bloodshed in the present is due to an endless chain of retribution set in motion by ancient Greeks who transgressed against the laws of nature, the gods, and the rights of their fellow men in pursuit of power and self-gain.
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