We’re excited to take part in the annual AWP Conference & Bookfair. Please stop by The Common, space AA19, to chat and check out our wares. This year’s conference will take place in Boston at the Hynes Convention Center and Sheraton Boston Hotel.
By NORMAN LOCK
The Common is pleased to present the opening pages of Norman Lock’s book-length poem, In the Time of Rat, which will be published by Ravenna Press this winter (2013). In a “narrow measure” muscular as Skelton’s but with the wit, precision, and grace of bonsai, Lock delivers the story of Nicolaas Jansen, “soldier/deserter,” insurgent subject and celebrant of Rat. Not since Ted Hughes’ Crow have we encountered a figure with this much disturbing gravity and charisma, and Rat is the more cunning and mercurial of the two. By the book’s end he has become God’s mimic and shadow, double to soldier and state, patron and incarnation of the impulse to war, that force relentlessly “turning/ what is human into/ meat.”
This is the final installment part of a three-part dispatch. Pt. 1 and Pt. 2 can be found on The Common’s website.
The first order of business was to find the source of the leak. I went downstairs to the parking lot and started the car. Water pooled on the ground in the time it took me to get out and raise the hood. Finally, I nailed it down to a blown intake gasket. A spot about six inches long between the engine head and the intake manifold that bled water and antifreeze.
My writing room faces the backyard of my condo, and a steep embankment lined with lush, subtropical vegetation. Hidden beneath the embankment runs a stream—sometimes the water is churning and alive, rushing toward the lake a hundred yards distant. In the warmer months, ibis, herons, and other gawky water birds wade and dive, the stream their hunting ground; through the plantation shutters, I’ll pause from typing to glimpse one of these tall creatures perched patiently atop the bank, surveying its lunch prospects.
Photographs by RACHEL BARRETT
Curated by JEFF BERGMAN
In every family, traditional portraits are hung up or carried around: cousins arrayed before a monument, parents holding their grandchildren, long-gone ancestors smiling from a black and white beyond. Though we cherish their aura, the faces and places remain static.
Sampling Thoreau
Part 1: Economy
Inspired by rereading Thoreau’s Walden for the first time in 30 years, I am writing a series of essays—an attempt to sample Thoreau, and swing the rhythm. I want to honor the young idealist with echoes of his aphoristic style and, at the same time, challenge his lofty ideals with the experience of an older woman. Click here to read part 2.
When I turned 50, my mother gave me $200 for my birthday. I bid it all on a black leather doctor’s bag I found on e-bay and very quickly received an email saying I’d “won” it. My husband Andy and I still refer to the bag as the German seller listed it: “doktorattache.” At the time, I imagined myself using it as what my mother would call a day bag to carry on the train to New York. Now, every Friday night we load the car with my doktorattache, and Andy’s shopping bags full of clothes and tools, and head southeast toward the New Bedford Harbor. When the road splits south of Boston, we stay right and are soon up to speed. I feel an intimacy with those on the road with us, as I do with strangers speeding down the track with me on the last outbound subway until morning—the anonymity; the neither here-nor thereness; the strange desire to overshoot my stop and keep traveling—not quiet desperation, just a sense of direction. When we finally turn on the harbor bridge, we have been on the road just over an hour.
By OPHELIA HU
Shick-a-shawing down Linea A, three stops from Cipro, Rome, I overheard a violin poorly played. Now and again, I curse my perfect pitch. A quarter tone drawled between D and D#, pulled headlong from a heavy-held bow like a dead rabbit from a hat. It was a nuisance. But I looked over to behold a blue-eyed boy crowned with thick brown hair and matching freckles.
Book by AMANDA COPLIN
Reviewed by
Amanda Coplin’s debut novel, The Orchardist, takes place in the Pacific Northwest, a land of dusty rural outposts, ancient forests, and cold deserts. We begin in 1900, in the fruit orchard of William Talmadge, on a farm his mother founded years before in Oregon Country by leading her children “north and then west, west and then north, as if drawing toward a destination already envisioned…” There are rows of apple and apricot trees on this grand, but desolate, estate. Talmadge is a bachelor and an orphan. Talmadge’s solitude is heightened by the many years of his youth spent fruitlessly searching for his dearly loved sister, who went missing shortly after their mother’s death, leaving only her bonnet and basket as clues. This early trauma foreshadows the losses to come. Talmadge has only two friends: a mute Nez Perce man named Clee and a local midwife-cum-apothecary, Caroline Middey, who has long helped him with minor ailments and the embarrassing venereal afflictions of his younger days.
1.
In a Q&A with PBS, filmmaker Perry Miller Adato talked about her documentary Paris: the Luminous Years (2010), which I recently learned about and—because I am hopeless when it comes to all things Parisian—I immediately watched. About the unprecedented gathering of artists in Paris during the early part of the 20thcentury, Adato said:
Don’t miss an issue! Subscribe to The Common.
Celebrating 15 Years