Eleanor Stanford | The Common

The Most-Read Pieces of 2024

December 21, 2024 News and Events

Before we close out another busy year of publishing, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on the unique, resonant, and transporting pieces that made 2024 memorable. The Common published over 175 stories, essays, poems, interviews, and features online and in print in 2024. Below, you can browse a list of the ten most-read pieces of 2024 to get a taste of what left an impact on readers.

January 2024 Poetry Feature: Part I, with work by Adrienne Su, Eleanor Stanford, Kwame Opoku-Duku, and William Fargason

“I wrote this poem on Holy Saturday, which historically is the day after Jesus was crucified, and the day before he was resurrected. That Spring, I was barely out of a nervous breakdown in which I had intense suicidal ideation … The moments of quiet during a time like that take on more meaning somehow, reminders I was still alive. And that day, that Saturday, I saw a bee.”

—William Fargason on “Holy Saturday”

Lover, before the pandemic

April 22, 2024 Issue 27, Issue 27 Poetry, Poetry

By ELEANOR STANFORD

I understood power
as the ability to excite
desire. When I passed
the socialists camped out
in the square in Mexico City
last summer I cringed
in recognition and took a picture
that I texted to my anarchist
in another country.

January 2024 Poetry Feature: Part I

January 11, 2024 Poetry

New poems by ADRIENNE SU, ELEANOR STANFORD, KWAME OPOKU-DUKU, and WILLIAM FARGASON

Table of Contents:

Adrienne Su, “Solitude”
Eleanor Stanford, “Lover, before the pandemic”
Kwame Opoku-Duku, “Glory”
William Fargason, “Holy Saturday”

Solitude
By Adrienne Su

My body rebelled
against the amorphousness
of American

motherhood, which asked
me to be available
as if I were five

women: two grandmas,

and the amazed girls….

October 28, 2020 Issue 20, Issue 20 Poetry, Lusosphere, Poetry

By ELEANOR STANFORD

and the amazed girls saw their bodies equipped with golden plumage, and the wings and feet of birds

I turn over the soil, my son chattering beside me. He wants to talk about time, its intransigency and evasions. Our hands breaking up the clumps, pulling out old roots.

A Kind of Privileged Existence That Sets It Apart From Other Worlds

October 28, 2019 Issue 18, Issue 18 Poetry, Poetry

By ELEANOR STANFORD

All summer, I sit on the porch, my son appearing, disappearing. Walls of rain or night, of larkspur, bleeding heart. The stone floor long ago lifted from the lion’s den.

Translator’s note: Having children is a way of remaking oneself.

June 2019 Poetry Feature: Eleanor Stanford

June 28, 2019 Poetry

Four Poems By ELEANOR STANFORD

Contents

Everything that exists in any world exists in the actual world
There is nothing so far away from us as not to be part of our world
The world we live in is a very inclusive thing
“Missing” universals that ought to be possible

Friday Reads: February 2015

February 20, 2015 Reviews

By ANDREW WILLIS, TYLER SAGE, JONATHAN MOODY, MARIAN CROTTY, ELEANOR STANFORD, OLIVIA WOLFGANG-SMITH

This month we’re playing in the borderlands, exploring the spaces between categories. Intercontinental love stories; strangers in strange lands; the struggle to remain constant in a world of transience. These books bend genre and their subjects navigate the passages between success and failure, present and past, public and private life—between where they are and where they have in mind.

Recommended:

Middle Men by Jim Gavin, The Shape of a Pocket by John Berger, Mo’ Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson and Ben Greenman, Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Belonging: A Culture of Place by bell hooks.

Contributors in Conversation: Rowan Moore Gerety and Eleanor Stanford

December 10, 2014 Podcasts & Audio

In this episode of The Common’s Contributors in Conversation podcast, Issue 06 contributors Rowan Moore Gerety and Eleanor Stanford read and discuss their essays “Well-Armed” and “Geology Primer (Fogo, Cape Verde).”

Language as the Homeland: An Interview with Eleanor Stanford

March 4, 2014 Interviews

ZINZI CLEMMONS interviews ELEANOR STANFORD

Eleanor Stanford

Eleanor Stanford is the author of the memoir História, História: Two Years in the Cape Verde Islands, and of a poetry collection, The Book of Sleep. Stanford’s essay “Geology Primer (Fogo, Cape Verde)” was published in Issue No. 06 of The Common. Fellow Philadelphian Zinzi Clemmons chatted with Stanford about poetic form, the importance of language, and ways to feel at home in the world.

Geology Primer (Fogo, Cape Verde)

November 1, 2013 Essays, Issue 06, Issue 06 Essays

By ELEANOR STANFORD

aa (pronounced “ah-ah”)

ORIGIN: <Hawaiian, ‘a’, “to burn.”

1. Lava that has a rough, jagged, spiny, and generally clinkery surface.

2. How to gloss this sharp language, its reflective surfaces, its chinks?

All posts tagged: Eleanor Stanford

Lover, before the pandemic

January 2024 Poetry Feature: Part I

and the amazed girls….

A Kind of Privileged Existence That Sets It Apart From Other Worlds

June 2019 Poetry Feature: Eleanor Stanford

Friday Reads: February 2015

Contributors in Conversation: Rowan Moore Gerety and Eleanor Stanford

Language as the Homeland: An Interview with Eleanor Stanford

Geology Primer (Fogo, Cape Verde)

Discover the extraordinary in The Common.