Join The Common for postcard readings, cocktails/ aperitivos, music, and dancing inspired by a night in Italy!
Join us for a reading (and for drinks!) celebrating work published in The Common‘s Dispatches column this past year; our featured writers will include Katherine Hill, Ira Sukrungruang, Margot Schlipp, Kurt Caswell, Brandi Katherine Herrera, Jeff Muse, and Hannah Gersen. These poems and essays take us coast to coast with their unique evocation of place.
Editor’s Note:
In October I had the pleasure of hearing the young Polish poet Tadeusz Dąbrowski read his poems in a bilingual performance at Atomic Books in Maryland, a stop on his recent tour of the United States. TC readers will no doubt join me in appreciation of his poems, which are simultaneously deeply moving and surprisingly comic. Hopefully you will also relish my aggressive effort to deliver his work to you. As soon as the reading was done I pursued him to the sidewalk, where I procured a promise that he would send us poems to publish. His word’s as good as his work: we’re offering four of his poems here, and three more will follow in the print issue.
Dabrowski is only thirty-four but has already published eight books of poetry; the list of his prizes is longer than the ingredients for plum pudding. His work has been translated around the world—into twenty languages—and his readership continues to grow. Another German collection is due out very soon, and Antonia Lloyd-Jones’ second volume of English translations is well underway—these poems come from that. He’s drawn high praise from Adam Zagajewski in his homeland, and in the US his Anglophone debut, Black Square, was hailed by Timothy Donnelly as a “brilliant, unforgettable book.” We welcome his work to our pages with sincere excitement.
By NINA PURO
Details Concerning the Individual Denizens and Their Residences
In New Mexico, days end with soaking the frijoles for tomorrow. They start with a lump of bacon grease sizzling in a cast-iron pan, with chipping a chunk of green chilé from one of the blocks in the freezer. People like food that hurts them as they eat it. Even the cocoa has chilé in it and a Spanish name and must be beaten to a froth.
As I approached the corner of Throop Avenue and Van Buren Street in early summer 2013, I couldn’t help but notice the giant “Murder – $50,000 Reward” sign that loomed over the intersection, emblazoned with the photo of a dead businessman. The New York City neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, I’d heard, was still a little “rough,” but the sign was unlike anything I’d seen outside of Wild West movies. Almost comically, the image was plastered with a blood-red ‘Solved’ caption, as though calling out a fatuous warning: attention, would-be Bed-Stuy murderers – you might, eventually, be caught.
By CHRIS KELSEY
Often, Jim left for work at 5:30 am. I’d hear the old Volvo growl to life, struggle into the snowy lane, and twitter and squeal as it slowly picked up speed on the icy street going away.
The National Endowment for the Arts has awarded The Common a 2014 Art Works Grant in the magazine’s first year of eligibility.
ZINZI CLEMMONS interviews YVONNE ADHIAMBO OWUOR
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor is the recipient of the 2003 Caine Prize for African Writing for her story “Weight of Whispers.” She is the author of the forthcoming novel, Dust (Knopf, January 2014), an excerpt of which was published in Issue No. 06 of The Common. While in South Africa Zinzi Clemmons talked with Kenyan-based Owuor about “deadlines as flexible soul mates,” lessons in artistic humility, consulting “the passing herdsmen” on the art of reading the landscape, and the up-and-coming literary world of Kenya.
Ground fog hovers out the back kitchen window, warm air over snow. We set out to walk before coffee. From the home of dear friends, we make our way down the dead-end road to the muddy grass path that leads us to the turn (right) down the rough-cleared way (duck under the fallen tree) to the fields owned by the nearby church and leased to the farmers. In a pair of borrowed rain boots and hooded sweatshirt (in late December), I feel a warm sweat rising.
Today we’re delighted to feature this close-up of a gorgeous recent acquisition by the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College.
Made in Italy of Carrara marble in the third quarter of the 2nd century CE, this ancient Roman sarcophagus features sea nymphs riding on the backs of sea centaurs while cupids fly overhead. It has “exceptional visual impact,” says Pamela Russell, the Mead’s head of education, “due to its impressive scale, lively marine subject, and pleasing symmetrical composition.”
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