2020 | Page 19 | The Common

January 2020 Poetry Feature

January 24, 2020 Poetry

Poems by JOHN FREEMAN, MARCUS SCOTT WILLIAMS, MEGAN PINTO, and REILLY D. COX.

New work by our contributors:

John Freeman | Translation in Paris

marcus scott williams | meadow on Wabash

Megan Pinto | The Blind

Reilly Cox | Silence of the Lambs: A Matter of Height

TRANSLATION IN PARIS
By John Freeman

There are no editors in the café
called Les Éditeurs. There’s not
a single novelist in the Saint-
Germain store gilded by novels.
There are no beasts of the chase
paddocked in the park, but that’s what
the West Germanic word—parruk—meant.
It took the overrunning of London
by its immigrant population in 1680
to turn the word into the spot we’d
park humans, so they could stumble
around in bewilderment at how time
is translation, change is nature’s rime.

Review: Like Water by Olga Zilberbourg

January 22, 2020 Reviews

Book by OLGA ZILBERBOURG

Review by JUNE GERVAIS

When I was nineteen and trying my hand at novel-writing for the first time, I found myself struggling with a story that alternated between two protagonists, a mother and a daughter. After reading my newest batch of pages, a beloved mentor observed that only the daughter was coming to life on the page. “There has to be more to this other woman than her role as a mother,” she said. I realize now that she was speaking from her own recent, still-raw experiences. “Try going back in time with the mother character,” she said. “Write a scene where she’s twenty, before she has a child, and see what she does. When you become a mother, your old self doesn’t disappear. All the parts of you that were there before are still there.”

The Hold Steady Sets the Scene

January 16, 2020 Essays

By ERIC R. DANTON

Thrashing Thru the Passion, the latest album from Brooklyn indie-rock band the Hold Steady, begins with a striking description: “He shaved his head at the airport / In a bar at the end of the concourse.” The song is called “Denver Haircut,” and it’s an intriguing enough opening that you can imagine being there at the far end of Concourse C at Denver International Airport, watching some guy with a cordless Wahl clipper and a sense of purpose.

The Common to Receive $15,000 Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts

January 15, 2020 News and Events

The Common will receive its fourth grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2020. The Art Works grant of $15,000 will be awarded to The Common to help publish diverse writers, expand its readership, and support The Common‘s international portfolios.

A Delta Hereafter 

January 15, 2020 Dispatches

By ASHLEY STIMPSON

Brinkley, Arkansas

The catfish arrives curled and snarling with grease, alongside fat disks of white onion, green tomato relish and wrinkled packets of tartar sauce. I proceed through it clumsily, betraying my Northern-ness, but I guess that much was plain when I opened my mouth.

As if she’s read the questions in my notebook, the waitress wipes tables and worries aloud to her only other customer.

Hen Medic: Maude Abbott and the Dawn of Cardiology

January 9, 2020 Essays

By GABRIEL BROWNSTEIN

This piece is an excerpt from The Open Heart Club.

October, 1931. Imagine that you’re riding a southbound train from Montreal to New York City. The woman across the aisle smells strange, a mix of rose water and formaldehyde. She has packages everywhere, on the seat beside her, in the rack above, bags, boxes, some wrapped in twine, some in brown paper. The paper looks stained, as though what’s inside is leaking. She’s got a portfolio full of prints and drawings. She keeps knocking over a big striped umbrella.

Marie-Andrée Gill: Poems in Translation from SPAWN

January 8, 2020 Poetry, Translation

Poetry by MARIE-ANDRÉE GILL
Translated from the French by KRISTEN RENEE MILLER

Poems appear in both French and English.

Translator’s Note

to lick the skin of the water / with a tongue I don’t speak

Marie-Andrée Gill’s Spawn is a surprising, colorful, virtuosic collection. Its brief, untitled poems span ’90s-kid nostalgia, the life cycle of fresh-water salmon, a coming of age, and the natural landscape of the Mashteuiatsh reserve, centered on Lake Piekuakami—a site of recreation and commerce, a reminder of conquest and ecological decline, a symbol of the ancient world, of sex, of the cycles of life. These poems are tightly interdependent, and Spawn could truly be read as a single, braided, book-length poem. But I want to focus here on a theme that became especially vital to my project of understanding and translating the book: recovery of language.

All posts tagged: 2020

January 2020 Poetry Feature

Review: Like Water by Olga Zilberbourg

The Hold Steady Sets the Scene

The Common to Receive $15,000 Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts

A Delta Hereafter

Hen Medic: Maude Abbott and the Dawn of Cardiology

Marie-Andrée Gill: Poems in Translation from SPAWN

Bid on a personalized postcard from your favorite author in our Author Postcard Auction, now till Dec. 2!