News & Events | Page 2 | The Common | A Modern Sense of Place: Stories, Poems, Essays & Images

Excerpt from Lamentations of Nezahualcóyotl: Nahuatl Poems

February 24, 2025 Poetry, Translation

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.

What We’re Reading: February 2025

February 21, 2025 Reviews

Curated by SAM SPRATFORD

This month, contributors KATHARINE HALLS, THEA MATTHEWS, and OLGA ZILBERBOURG take your reading lists to Prague, Damascus, and New York City with four poetry and fiction recommendations that are wholly absorbing, in their stories and settings alike.

Bohumil Hrabal’s I Served the King of England, trans. Paul Wilson; recommended by TC Online Contributor Olga Zilberbourg

Excerpt from The Undercurrent

February 20, 2025 Fiction

By SARAH SAWYER

This piece is excerpted from The Undercurrent by Sarah Sawyer ’97, a guest at Amherst College’s LitFest 2025. Register for this exciting, 10^th-anniversary celebration of Amherst’s literary legacy and life.

Austin, Texas
1987

A girl leans on a metal guardrail at the edge of a brown field. She will not stand here again. She knows this, so she is trying to notice everything: the tall stalks of grass turning into thick stitches of coral and gold, the sun a dark orange marble rolling past the clouds. When she looks down, she sees her toes curling in the gravel, the dents from the hot guardrail burning the soft undersides of her forearms.

If she stays here, facing the field, she can’t see the bulldozers, perched like yellow vultures in the cul-de-sac behind her.

Dispatch from Marutha Nilam

February 19, 2025 Dispatches

Poems by SUKIRTHARANI, ILAMPIRAI, and SAKTHI ARULANANDHAM

Translated from the Tamil by THILA VARGHESE

Table of Contents:

Sukirtharani, “For the sake of living”
Ilampirai, “Loot”
Sakthi Arulanandham, “Land Grabbing Bird”

Black and white image of a bird with a long neck

Drawing by Sakthi Arulanandham for her poem “Land Grabbing Bird.”

Marutha Nilam (The agricultural and plains region)

For the sake of living
By Sukirtharani

In the courtyard filled with
bubbling water flowing from
the palm-leaf thatched roof
during monsoons,
grew a golden shower tree.
On that tree, yellow flowers
bloomed in clusters.
There was a nest on the tree
where sparrows with short beaks
would be chirping incessantly.
Sitting under the shade of the tree,
I would be studying passers-by.

Excerpt from Group Living and Other Recipes

February 18, 2025 Essays

By LOLA MILHOLLAND

These piece is excerpted from a memoir-cookbook entitled Group Living and Other Recipes by Lola Milholland ’07, a guest at Amherst College’s LitFest 2025. Register for this exciting, 10^th-anniversary celebration of Amherst’s literary legacy and life.

When I visit my mom in the Driftless region of southwest Wisconsin, we bike together. She’ll pull out the old road bike her brother Paul built from parts when he lived with us in Portland. It’s in the shed that sits between her little year-round greenhouse and the outhouse that serves as the only loo on the property. We cycle up her one-mile gravel driveway, out to roads that twist and turn through hilly farmland, past Amish kids in overalls and sturdy full-length dresses working with horses and hanging up laundry. From the ridgetops, the hills in every direction look like bubbles on pizza dough.

In the fall, the hillsides change color every day. The basswood leaves turn a daisy yellow, and the oak leaves become the orange-red of a Firecracker ice pop. The Amish on Wolf Valley Road will be harvesting corn. Their two-horse team pulls a metal scythe through the stalks, leaving behind a flat field of roughage like a pile of cut hair.

Excerpt from Tripas

February 17, 2025 Poetry

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, 10^th-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—

Four Poems by JinJin Xu

February 14, 2025 Poetry

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, 10^th-anniversary celebration of Amherst’s literary legacy and life.

Table of Contents

“There They Are”
“To Your Brother, Who Is Without Name”
“The Revolution is Not a Dinner Party”
“Against This Earth, We Knock”

LitFest 2025 Excerpts: Video Poems by Paisley Rekdal

February 12, 2025 Audio, Poetry, Poetry Recordings

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.

Gently

February 11, 2025 Essays

By DAN HECK

It’s sometime in 2007. I’m almost 21. At night I stock bulk items in the backroom of a Target. Dante helped me get the job. My best friend since eighth grade: the human bully-repellent with rockstar swagger and long, luscious hair. Target’s pay sucks, and I hate work, but it’s something I can do with Dante.

Most nights, we unload the truck’s thousand or more items together. The two of us in a tight, hot, truck container, tearing down walls of packaged toys, clothes, food, and cleaning supplies. One time, the wall of goods is packed extra tight. It’s probably 120 degrees in the container and managers demand we keep the unload moving. I’m too precious with the cargo, so nothing moves and heat exhaustion creeps in. Eyesight blurs. Standing dizzies. I’m a couple sweats away from passing out. I get a cold Gatorade and a five-minute break, but only if I finish the unload. A manager threatens to steal both away.

Home and/or Home: Seán Carlson Interviews Erin Fornoff and Gustav Parker Hibbett

February 10, 2025 Interviews

When ERIN FORNOFF, GUSTAV PARKER HIBBETT, and SEÁN CARLSON met over a drink in the lobby of the Arms Hotel, located on the main square of Listowel in southwest Ireland, they introduced themselves by comparing their American upbringings. Having grown up in North Carolina, New Mexico, and Massachusetts, respectively, they shared their experiences residing and writing in Ireland.

For Fornoff, Hibbett, and Carlson, their lives in Ireland have granted them new perspectives on their lives in the U.S. and welcomed them into new communities that help bring their poetry to life. Before leaving, they all paused for a photo beside a typewriter and a goose-feather quill pen on display under the gaze of a countertop cherub sculpture. In the longstanding hub of an agricultural community, where tractors still regularly cart calves to market, the traditional tools of writing also reinforced the lifeblood of local literature.