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January 2014 Poetry Feature

January 23, 2014 Poetry, Translation

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.

Tour Guide

January 22, 2014 Dispatches

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.

Bed-Stuy – Buy or Die?

January 21, 2014 Essays, In House

By MELODY NIXON

Grafitti

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.

On Fumes

January 15, 2014 Dispatches

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.

NEA Art Works Grant (2014)

January 15, 2014 News and Events

The National Endowment for the Arts has awarded The Common a 2014 Art Works Grant in the magazine’s first year of eligibility.

Explosive Possibilities: Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor on Writing and Kenya

January 14, 2014 Interviews

ZINZI CLEMMONS interviews YVONNE ADHIAMBO OWUOR

Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor headshot

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.

In the Fields

January 13, 2014 Essays, In House

By ELIZABETH WITTE

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.

Two “Luckless Dears” of Ancient Rome

January 10, 2014 Studio

sarcophagus

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.”

At the Phillips 66

January 8, 2014 Dispatches

By KURT CASWELL

After the wind, a man named Chuck died lying on the ice next to the fuel pump at the Phillips 66 off I-80 on the east side of Rawlins, Wyoming. I helped his friend lift him down from the passenger seat of the pickup, a big man, heavy and round, dressed in heavy Carhart work clothes against the cold. I gentled his head against my chest, holding him under the arms, a rag doll pulled down in the middle, my cheek so close to his, his little moustache, his hairy ears, his jowly neck. He was already dead, no pulse, no breath, his eyes gone out, but the 911 operator asked us to begin chest compressions.

Detroit’s Walls of Spite

January 7, 2014 Essays

By CAROLYN KRAUS

A six-foot-high, foot-thick concrete wall begins at 8 Mile Road, Detroit’s northern border, known as the Line. The wall marches south for half a mile along the property line behind Birwood Street, cuts through a city park, and halts at a dead end street—a network of potholes and buckled asphalt.Driving my children to and from our Northwest Detroit home just south of the Line in the ’80s and ’90s, I used to detour along the Birwood Wall and wonder at its history. I didn’t wonder about the trash and bottle-strewn park that stirred to ominous life at night and, like so many other leering vacancies in the city, had long since ceased to be a place where children could safely play. Like the park, the Birwood Wall had outlived its original purpose. Now, grey, grim, and bare, it haunted the edge of the ghost park. As waves of residents departed Detroit for the whiter, brighter future of the suburbs, as houses and shops fell derelict and tumbled, sturdier features like the wall persisted, emerging into relief like a low tide of relics.