Calling All Gulfie Kids!
This is the first 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: water & power by Steven Dunn, King Me by Roger Reeves, and An American Marriage by Tayari Jones
water & power by Steven Dunn
Recommended by Elly Hong, Thomas E. Wood ’61 Fellow
The cover of water & power calls it a novel. Both author Steven Dunn and the book’s narrator describe it as a “fictional ethnography,” and this broader term is perhaps a more fitting description of a book that defies classification. Most of water & power resembles a novella in flash, written in prose that comes in bursts no longer than a page. Yet there are also moments of poetry, as well as photographs, found documents, and collages. The book’s dynamic structure was immediately striking, and both its form and its content continued to stun me as I read.
New work by DAVID MILLS
Table of Contents
These poems are part of a series about slavery in New York City. The City is home to America’s oldest and largest slave cemetery—The Negro Burial Ground—which is located in Manhattan’s City Hall area. This slave cemetery (officially open between 1712-1795) contains 15,000 bodies.
Poems by CLAUDIA MASIN
Translated from the Spanish by ROBIN MYERS
Poems appear in both Spanish and English
Translator’s Note
When I translate Claudia Masin, I feel like I’m ice skating. This is not a foolproof metaphor, I know. But what I mean, mostly, is that it’s exhilarating. Her long, deft, elegant lines; her line breaks, both graceful and unpredictable; her limber back-and-forth between the broadly rhetorical and the minutely descriptive: all of this, all of her language, structure, and sense of timing, forms a surface, a gleaming expanse that I feel free—I want to feel free—to glide across. Fast enough for a sense of wonder, the illusion of ease; not so fast that I don’t notice what’s around me. Or beneath me: the inherent spookiness of ice, the shadows under the surface, the plants and creatures stilled but still living where we can sense more than see them.
According to the story, my third word—after Mommy and Daddy—was “picture.” In Zagreb, where I spent the first two years of my life, my mother lifted me from my pram to see the pieces of art. “Look, Jehanne, look at the picture.” On sunny days, we took the funicular from our apartment in the old section of the city, downhill to the lower, newer portion, where we visited galleries or just toured the neighborhoods. Or, we wandered closer to home, through cobblestone streets to St. Mark’s Church—with its ecstasy of colorful roof tiles—only a few blocks away. Even if we stayed indoors, we could gaze down from the windows of our apartment into the courtyard of the Meštrović Atelier, a gallery dedicated to one of Yugoslavia’s most renowned artists. The rumor went that, years before, Meštrović himself had slept in the very rooms where we now slept, ate where we ate, regarded the same medieval views of Zagreb. Our dining room, which was punctuated with a series of rounded alcoves, once displayed the sculptor’s works-in-progress.
The United States
a rotor spins in concentric circles
the epicenter a DC street at dusk
even a military helicopter’s incessant droning
can’t wake this country to its circumstance
Dear friends,
We at The Common are ashamed by this country’s injustices and support the nationwide protests against anti-Black racism, white supremacy, and police brutality.
Our mission has always been to serve as a public gathering space for the exchange of observations and ideas. Now more than ever we apply ourselves to the work of soliciting and amplifying voices that illuminate.
By AMY STUBER
But he could have been. My father was a similar man. His name was Richard Cheney, though he never went by Dick, and he never lived at the Naval Observatory. He was an orthopedic surgeon in suburban Kansas City who said stupid things like, “These hands are gold,” to people at dinner parties where he was often the one who ate more than his fair share of Shrimp Scampi and dove into the pool drunk in his clothes because he thought everything he did was a fun spectacle.
Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado
To sing of what I fear,
shaking my body,
has an integrative power.
Sometimes something is
so funny even my legs laugh.
I do not know
the frequency of god,
but I adore
the frequency of laughter.
Not all frequencies are free.
I’ve learned this the hard way
from people who would profit
from what makes others shake.
Who teaches us to fear?
Who teaches us to laugh?
I would show you aspen
winnowing the wind
so that you would always
ken beauty from quake.
But it is not mine to always.
It is mine to some,
to often,
to rarely,
to mostly,
if I’m lucky,
to mostly love
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Celebrating 15 Years