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Topical Poetry: An Interview with Jonathan Moody

February 3, 2015 Interviews

Jonathan Moody

Jonathan Moody is a poet and professor. His first full-length collection, The Doomy Poems, deals with time and place through persona poems, and is described by Terrance Hayes as having an “innovative funkiness that transcends the ruckus and heartache of our modern world.” Moody’s second poetry collection, Olympic Butter Gold, won the 2014 Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize and will be published in summer this year. His poem “Dear 2Pac” appears in Issue 08 of The Common, and his “Portrait of Hermes as a B-Boy,” “Kleosphobia,” and “Paranoid,” have all been featured at The Common Online. Melody Nixon caught up with Moody this winter, and between New Zealand and Texas they talked poetry activism, politics, Houston skyscrapers, and the “cosmopolitan radiance” of Downtown Pittsburgh.

Review: Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes

January 26, 2015 Reviews

Book by KERRIN MCCADDEN
Reviewed by DARA BARNAT

Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes

Kerrin McCadden’s poignant debut collection of poetry, Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes, is filled with composed wisdom for how to cope with separation in general, and divorce in particular. The collection won the New Issues Poetry Prize in 2014, and McCadden’s poetry has appeared widely in Best American Poetry 2012,American Poetry Review, Poet Lore, and elsewhere.

Layaali Arabic Music Performance

January 22, 2015 News and Events

Event Date:

Thursday, March 26, 2015 – 7:00pm – 9:00pm

Location:

POWERHOUSE, Amherst College

Join us at the Amherst College Powerhouse for an electrifying musical performance by Layaali, a Massachusetts-based group committed to furthering the appreciation of traditional Arab music and culture.

Doors open at 7pm on Thursday, March 26. Concert begins at 7:30pm.

Free and open to the public!

Part of the Copeland Colloquium Program at Amherst College.
Photo by Layaali Facebook Page.

Ask a Local: Renee Simms, University Place, WA

January 22, 2015 Interviews

With RENEE SIMMS

Name: Renee Simms

Current city: University Place, WA, which is a suburb five minutes outside of Tacoma

How long have you lived here: Since 2011

Translation Master Class – Postponed

January 21, 2015 News and Events

Event Date:

Wednesday, March 25, 2015 – 4:30pm – 6:00pm

Location:

PAINO LECTURE HALL, BENESKI MUSEUM, Amherst College

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED. Check back for rescheduling. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Hisham Bustani and Thoraya El-Rayyes will lead a translation master class. Drawing on texts in an array of source languages, the master class will focus on important literary considerations for translators, translation techniques, and the experimental and collaborative process of translation.

To register, email info@thecommononline.org.
Part of the Copeland Colloquium Program at Amherst College.

Big Jim

January 21, 2015 Dispatches

By CHRIS KELSEY

Nothing could be done about the cancer in him, so we did not bring him bread. He was dying, and doing so more actively now, though still at a pace he commanded. Even Death let him call most of the shots. We brought Sol what he wanted: vodka and cigarettes.

Stories We Tell

January 19, 2015 Essays, In House

By MARIAN CROTTY

1. A few days before I moved to Baltimore this summer, I read an article about the city’s racial dynamics that had just been published by D. Watkins, a relatively young black writer who’d grown up in Baltimore. He described a city so racially segregated that it felt like two different places: one black, one white; one dangerous, one quaint; one introduced to him as a kid growing up in East Baltimore and one that he found later as a college student in North Baltimore, attending the predominately white private liberal arts college, where I had just accepted a job. Watkins painted a picture of two adjacent but separate worlds, a place where, he says, white people somehow manage to host literary events in a city that is more than 60% black without one black face in the crowd.

Friday Reads: January 2015

January 16, 2015 Reviews

By ZEINA HASHEM BECK, MELODY NIXON, FRANCESCA MARCIANO, STEPHEN O’CONNOR, OLIVIA WOLFGANG-SMITH

As we begin 2015, our recommenders are heading into the wilderness. These books range widely through time and space, each embracing its own unique heart of contradiction—exile and home; passion and failure; reason and chaos; doubt and confidence. Heavy with both fictional biography and memoir, we bring you familiar faces from the dark woods of alienation and obsession. Dive into the new year with these five maps by which to recognize yourself and find a path through the forest.

Recommended:

The Same Roads Back by Frank Dullaghan, The Season of Migration by Nellie Hermann, Swimming Studies by Leanne Shapton, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines by Janna Levin, Fourth of July Creek by Smith Henderson

Review: Almost Famous Women

January 13, 2015 Reviews

Book by MEGAN MAYHEW BERGMAN
Reviewed by KELLY FORDON

Almost Famous Women

Fans of Megan Mayhew Bergman’s first short-story collection, Birds of a Lesser Paradise, which appeared in 2012, have been looking forward to her second collection ever since. The premise of Bergman’s new book, Almost Famous Women, is immediately intriguing. Bergman culled through the annals of history to locate women who brushed up against fame, thanks to proximity to famous people or now-forgotten accomplishments. Publisher’s Weekly commended her for this “feminist reclamation” of narratives largely ignored; a compilation of 13 fictionalized tales of women including James Joyce’s daughter, Lucia; Butterfly McQueen, the actress who played Prissy in “Gone with the Wind”; Allegra Byron, Lord Byron’s cast-off daughter; and Dolly Wilde, Oscar Wilde’s impetuous, drug-addled, niece.

January 2015 Poetry Feature

January 9, 2015 Poetry

At The Common, we’re celebrating the New Year with four poets new to our pages.