Podcast: Amanda Mei Kim on “California Obscura”

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Transcript: Amanda Mei Kim

Amanda Mei Kim speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her essay “California Obscura,” which appears in The Common’s most recent issue, in a portfolio of writing and art from and about the immigrant farmworker community. Amanda discusses how the essay changed and developed over many drafts. The finished piece explores her childhood growing up on her parents’ tenant farm in Saticoy, California, just north of Los Angeles. It also examines the long history of farmworker resistance and labor movements in the area, which crossed divides of race, ethnicity, and origin. 

portrait of author and issue cover

Podcast: Amanda Mei Kim on “California Obscura”
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April 2024 Poetry Feature: New Metamorphoses

By ALAN BAER, CARLIE HOFFMAN, CAMPBELL MCGRATH, and FARAH PETERSON.

Table of Contents:

  • Campbell McGrath, “Hendrixiana”
  • Carlie Hoffman, “A Condo for Sale Overlooking the Cemetery in Kearny, NJ” and “Reading Virginia Woolf in a Women in Literature Class at Bergen County Community College”
  • Farah Peterson, “Daedalus in Exile” and “Pasiphaë’s Grief”
  • Alan Baer, “Orpheus”

 

April 2024 Poetry Feature: New Metamorphoses
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Saturday

By HANNAH JANSEN 

Rockport, ME


Saturday                                                                                                

At the laundromat the whir of machines,
whorled & busy, the pleasure & difficulty

of stillness     Waiting, sockless, I aspire to be
the cross-legged woman reading a magazine,

Saturday
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Dark Vader

By ANNELL LÓPEZ

“Dark Vader” is excerpted from Annell López’s I’ll Give You a Reason, out now from Feminist Press.

cover of i'll give you a reason. dark blue cover, with a toolbox that contains a drawing of a city landscape inside

 

I was registering for the GED when Junie stormed into the house, slamming the door behind her. Her heavy Princess and the Frog backpack fell off her shoulder; the drop made the hardwood floors of our walk-up tremble.

Dark Vader
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Writing into Negative Space (Absence): Tiana Nobile interviews Sarah Audsley

 

Tiana Nobile (left) Sarah Audsley (right)Tiana Nobile (left) Sarah Audsley (right)

Sarah Audsley’s debut poetry collection Landlock X (Texas Review Press, 2023) is described by Sally Keith as “formally active in its interrogation; it is as if somewhere—in poetry, in art, in translation—there is a combination for righting the painful history of adoption, for learning to live simultaneously with and against.” Audsley has received support for her work from The Rona Jaffe Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, and the Banff Centre. In this interview, long-time poet-friends TIANA NOBILE and SARAH AUDSLEY discuss writing into negative space. Their intimate conversation touches on contending with audience, silences, absence, and writing from the perspective of the adoptee experience.

Writing into Negative Space (Absence): Tiana Nobile interviews Sarah Audsley
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Translation: Poems from The Dickinson Archive

By MARÍA NEGRONI
Translated by ALLISON A. DEFREESE

Poems appear below in English and the original Spanish.

 

Translator’s note:
The Dickinson Archive is a series of 72 short meditations exploring the creative process through the lens of New England poet Emily Dickinson’s lifework and words. Dickinson said she was in the presence of poetry when “I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off.” The Dickinson Archive is a book that elicits such responses. Its poems, based on a few of the 9,000 words that Dickinson used most often, get under our skin and into our bones—whether our internal scaffolding is thick as a mammoth’s tusk or delicate as the rib of a songbird. Though María modestly describes the book as a “tribute,” the unique and unconventional pieces in this archive showcase Negroni’s own experimentation with form and language. Moments in these translations where word choice or grammatical structure may give the reader pause are not accidents; they are examples of Negroni at her finest as an experimental writer forging a cadence, locution, and syntax all her own. The Dickinson Archive is a book about play and creation. What light and lightness to translate such poems, to join this dialogue between women that spans continents and centuries, to channel the spirit of Emily Dickinson’s work through María Negroni’s words.

Translation: Poems from The Dickinson Archive
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New Poems from YOU ARE HERE, edited by Ada Limón

By ADAM CLAY, KHADIJAH QUEEN, ROGER REEVES, ANALICIA SOTELO, and RIGOBERTO GONZÁLEZ

To kick off Poetry Month we’re bringing you selections from Poet Laureate Ada Limón’s new anthology, You Are Here, out this month from Milkweed Editions.

As part of her signature project, “You Are Here,” 24th US Poet Laureate Ada Limón has commissioned fifty-two contemporary American poets to observe and reflect on their place in the natural world. The resulting anthology of original poems is a timely portrait of the myriad ways the natural world speaks to us and reflects us. Some of the poems included here contend with the destruction of nature, while others consider its abundance and resilience—and some do both at the same time. While these poems emerge from deeply personal perspectives, together they reveal that nature, like poetry, is universal—and that our interpretations of the natural world are grounded in the nature of our humanity. They also serve as a call for readers to take in the nature all around them, wherever they are. 

(from the Foreword to You Are Here, by Carla Hayden, Librarian of Congress)

New Poems from YOU ARE HERE, edited by Ada Limón
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March 2024 Poetry Feature: New Poems by Our Contributors

New poems by our contributors DAVID LEHMAN, MATT DONOVAN, JULIA KOLCHINSKY DASBACH, and GRAY DAVIDSON CARROLL

 

Table of Contents:

  • David Lehman, “Honor Code” and “Rhode Island is Famous for You (for Denise Duhamel)” 
  • Matt Donovan, “Looking at the Statue of Athena in Nashville’s Replica of the Parthenon, Waiting for Something to Happen”
  • Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, “What does the vulture say to the snowman(?) or how my son is learning to tell jokes(.)”
  • Gray Davidson Carroll, “November 19, 2022,”
March 2024 Poetry Feature: New Poems by Our Contributors
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The Common’s Issue 27 Launch Party

This event has passed, but you can watch a recording of it below, or here on YouTube!


  


 

Issue 27 cover of The Common

The Common Spring Launch Party
Wednesday, April 24, 2024, 7pm
Friendly Reading Room, Frost Library
Amherst College, Amherst, MA

Free and open to the public, wine and snacks will be provided. 

Join us for the launch of Issue 27 of The Common! We welcome essayist and AGNI editor Sven Birkerts, poet January Gill O’Neil, and fiction writer Jade Song. Issues will be available for purchase. We’ll have brief readings, a short Q&A, and lots of time to mingle!

 

Left to Right: Sven Birkerts, January Gill O'Neil, Jade Song Left to Right: Sven Birkerts, January Gill O’Neil, Jade Song

Sven Birkerts is the author of a number of books of essay and memoir. His The Miro Worm and the Mysteries of Writing will be published in October. Former Director of the Bennington Writing Seminars, he co-edits the journal AGNI. He lives in Amherst with his wife. 

January Gill O’Neil is the author of Glitter Road (CavanKerry Press, 2024), Rewilding (CavanKerry Press, 2018), recognized by Mass Center for the Book as a notable poetry collection for 2018; Misery Islands (CavanKerry Press, 2014), winner of a 2015 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence; and Underlife (CavanKerry Press, 2009). The recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, O’Neil was awarded a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant and was named the John and Renée Grisham Writer in Residence for 2019-2020 at the University of Mississippi, Oxford. She is an associate professor of English at Salem State University and is board chair of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (2022-2024). O’Neil lives in Beverly, Massachusetts.

Jade Song is a writer, art director, and artist in New York City. Her debut novel Chlorine was published by William Morrow/HarperCollins (US) and Footnote Press (UK) in 2023 and will be translated into Chinese and French. Chlorine was selected as a New York Times Editor’s Choice, lauded as “visionary and disturbing,” and listed as a must read book by Buzzfeed, Cosmopolitan, Vanity Fair, and other outlets. Say hi @jadessong and jadessong.com

The Common’s Issue 27 Launch Party
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