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The Common Statement

November 1, 2014 Essays, Issue 08, Issue 08 Essays

To get anywhere from the borgo—the walled-in cluster of medieval houses and skinny lanes connecting the castle, the church, and a tiny grassy square—one must go steeply downhill and then steeply up. Each morning, I choose a different high point from which to take in the magnetic hills of this corner of Lunigiana in northwest Tuscany, where friends have made a part-time home. Once I saw a handful of seniors out for a stroll, and I often say hello to a man in his eighties whose dog takes him out for jaunts, very slowly due to his heart trouble, but otherwise I encounter no one.

The Overachieving Underachiever: An Interview with Benjamin Anastas

November 1, 2014 Interviews

MELODY NIXON interviews BENJAMIN ANASTAS

Benjamin Anastas

Benjamin Anastas is the author of Too Good to be True, a memoir described by The New York Times as “smart and honest and searching,” and “so plaintive and raw it will leave most writers… with heart palpitations.” He has written two novels, An Underachiever’s Diary, and The Faithful Narrative of a Pastor’s Disappearance, as well as multiple reviews and essays, one of which, “Boys with a Synth,” is published in Issue 06 of The Common. Melody Nixon talked with Anastas about his skepticism for social media, the role of the writer in society, and memoir as fiction’s “whiny and embarrassing stepchild.”

Burial at Shanidar

November 1, 2014 Issue 08, Issue 08 Poetry, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry

By ELIZABETH HAZEN

Pollen found in one of the Shanidar graves suggests that Neanderthals, too, buried flowers with their dead.

The pollen could be mere coincidence—
traces left by a prehistoric rat
that ate flowers near the grave—but we prefer

The Origamist

November 1, 2014 Issue 08, Issue 08 Poetry, Poetry

By DANIEL TOBIN

The Cat’s Eye Nebula—one could begin
there as a way of showing how being
folds in upon itself, always to form
new configurations. That’s where we’re from,

Excoriating Ghosts

November 1, 2014 Issue 08, Issue 08 Poetry, Poetry

By NEIL SHEPARD

June’s consuming,
stripping down darkness
to its thinnest hours,
swallowing sleep. Not
the fireflies, not the moon,

Starving the Mustangs

November 1, 2014 Issue 08, Issue 08 Poetry, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry

By ELIZABETH METZGER

Never again will I feed the mustangs my mind,
Outstretched in the grey moon of morning.
Ours is a ritual of nevers, the lung’s nocturne

Vers de Societe

November 1, 2014 Issue 08, Issue 08 Poetry, Poetry

By ISHION HUTCHINSON

Some meager talk of Larkin
over quiche and pâté, olives
the proclaimed ragamuffin
picked at as though our lives;

Trouble on the Road Again

November 1, 2014 Issue 08, Issue 08 Poetry, Poetry

By ISHION HUTCHINSON

Scavenging down the blue potholed hill, rocking
out of cobalt acid, they steam chromatic, these Elijahs
in their cloud wheels, fatherless and man-killing,
their guts bloated with red heat, lice, cast-iron-soldiers

Burden

October 23, 2014 Issue 08, Issue 08 Poetry, Poetry

By JAMES BYRNE

for Yusef Komunyakaa

Downtown, already snagged between two countries, I make stock footage for an English return—block after block, hobbling in unwalkable shoes, uptown from the Ground Zero memorial where, today, Obama laid wreaths and tousled the head of Cannizzaro: a one-year-old boy on 9/11.

Our Poor Perishable World

October 23, 2014 Issue 08, Issue 08 Art

By BRIAN SHOLIS

In a photograph Robert Adams took northeast of Riverside, California, in 1982, serpentine paths lead toward the horizon line; it’s not easy to discern whether these are creeks, dirt trails, or roads. Human presence takes the form of wooden poles carrying electric wires, which stride diagonally from the bottom left of the composition toward the distance at right. Scrubby brush covers the low hill that spreads out beneath Adams’s camera, a few trees poke up disconsolately here and there, and a larger hill dominates the right-hand edge of the picture. In the distance is the radiance of an invisible sun, an onrushing whiteness that presses toward the camera and blots out the landscape’s details.