All posts tagged: Jeffrey Harrison

The Most-Read Pieces of 2024

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.

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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”

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The Shirt by David Ryan

He fingers the cloth, imagines the fingers of a millworker feeding the cord into a sewing machine, shuddering wooden bobbins in some industrial town. And then he tries it on.

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Dispatch from Moscow by Afton Montgomery

A toddler in a blue t-shirt cocked a pistol at me. Silver glinted in October sun. He clicked the trigger, Dad and Mom looking on. Got her is what the kid said to Dad, a man closer to seven feet tall than six.

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October 2024 Poetry Feature: New Poems by Our Contributors, with work by Nathaniel Perry and Tyler Kline

“These poems are ‘versions’ of the psalms—or more accurately, they are poems that freely borrow phases from the King James versions of the psalms and think on some of the themes. [They take] place in the fictional setting I’m calling The Olive Garden (not the restaurant)—a kind of grove and adjacent town where the speaker has been sent by something resembling God.”

—Nathaniel Perry on “34 (Song, with Young Lions)” and “36 (Song, with Contranym)”

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Silk Road by Nieves García Benito, translated by Carmela Ferradans

Rashad Brahim is in “no man’s land”: that stony and rough place in between Castillejos and Sebta in northern Morocco, facing the Spanish border. Born in Dosso, in southern Nigeria, he was now twenty-two years old and had always wanted to leave his homeland. How he and his friends, Abdellah Salim and Abderrahim Zinder, have come this far is a mystery.

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The Con Artist by Glenn Bertram

 

gazebo in front of lake
 
“‘The Con Artist’ is a story about performance, both conscious and habitual. The promise of escape—permanent, or perhaps merely transitory—figures heavily”
 

—Glenn Bertram

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November 2024 Poetry Feature, with work by G.C. Waldrep, Allison Funk, and Kevin O’Connor

“The sound of the two shoals at Glendale [South Carolina]—the Upper and Lower—is a particular sound, a peculiar sound. Sound is real, but not real in the same way matter, as matter, is real. And we don’t see sound, which seems wrong, somehow—within the tyranny of seeing.”

— G.C. Waldrep on “Below the Shoals, Glendale”

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Waters of Reclamation: Raychelle Heath Interviews Caroline M. Mar

“When my dear friend Carrie was looking for someone to do this interview, I jumped at the chance. I loved her first book, Special Education, and was really excited to read Dream of the Lake. The themes of language and identity spoke to me deeply.”

—Raychelle Heath

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Woodpecker by Jeffrey Harrison

its head popped up from the hollowed-out stump / like a jack-in-the-box, beak raised / at an angle that looked either jaunty / or quizzical, as though asking something / of us, but not waiting for an answer, / which, in any case, we wouldn’t have had.

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More to the Story by Michael David Lukas

For a long time, I told myself that it was the feeling of the thing that mattered, the refraction of truth if not the truth itself. Then I got that email from Uncle Herb—‘There’s more to the story than you might think’—and emotional truth wasn’t nearly enough. Not by a long shot. I needed to know where those Nazi medals came from.

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Thanks for a great year! We’re excited to continue sharing work by writers all over the world with you in 2025. Keep up with the art, prose, and poetry we publish each week by subscribing to our newsletter

The Most-Read Pieces of 2024
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Woodpecker

By JEFFREY HARRISON

At first I thought the pileated woodpecker
that lifted up from the yard as we came home
from a walk in the woods, flapping
away on long black wings that curved
up at the tips and flashed white
underneath, might be a visitation

Woodpecker
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The Most-Read Pieces of 2023

As our new year of publishing and programming picks up speed, we at The Common wanted to reflect on the pieces that made last year such a great one! We published over 200 pieces online and in print in 2023. Below, you can browse a list of the six most-read pieces of 2023 to see which stories, essays, and poems left an impact on readers. 

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Two Poems from The Spring of Plagues by Ana Carolina Assis, translated by Heath Wing

bird on a branch

“i wish I could / prevent your death / and bury your body alive / in the puny damp / earth
we tended / so that it kept on living / mandioca corn banana / would not sprout forth / 
but instead / acerola cherry blackberry pitanga hog plum.” 

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January 2023 Poetry Feature, with work by Tina Cane, Myronn Hardy, and Marc Vincenz

Purple flowers close up 
“Sheila had IHOP     delivered to her apartment     in El Alto, NY    / on January 6th    
so she could kick back     self-proclaimed terrorist     / that she is     and eat pancakes
     while watching white supremacists / storm the Capital.”

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The Most-Read Pieces of 2023
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The Story of a Box

By JEFFREY HARRISON

Marcel Duchamp's Boite: a box that folds out to reveal miniatures of various art works.

PARTIAL VIEW OF RESTORED HARRISON BOÎTE. MARCEL DUCHAMP (AMERICAN 1887-1968), BOX IN A VALISE (BOÎTE-EN-VALISE) FROM OR BY MARCEL DUCHAMP OR RROSE SÉLAVY, 1963 (SERIES E ). CINCINNATI ART MUSEUM: GIFT OF ANNE W. HARRISON AND FAMILY IN MEMORY OF AGNES SATTLER HARRISON AND ALEXINA “TEENY” SATTLER DUCHAMP, 2016.305 © ASSOCIATION MARCEL DUCHAMP / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NY / ADAGP, PARIS 2023. IMAGE COURTESY OF CINCINNATI ART MUSEUM, PHOTOGRAPHY BY ROB DESLONGCHAMPS

 

“Everything important that I have done can be put into a little suitcase.”
—Marcel Duchamp, Life magazine, 1952

For many years I hardly told anyone that my grandmother’s sister Teeny was married to Marcel Duchamp, and before that to Pierre Matisse, the art dealer son of Henri. Friends I’ve known all my life have stopped me in disbelief when these facts have come up in passing—a disbelief arising not from the facts themselves but from my never having shared them. The first time I ever mentioned the connection to anyone outside the family, I was in college, sitting in the Hungarian Pastry Shop on Amsterdam Avenue with my professor, the poet David Shapiro. “Wait,” he said, “Teeny Duchamp is your great aunt?!” I was surprised he knew exactly who she was.

The Story of a Box
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February 2021 Poetry Feature

Poems by REBECCA MORGAN FRANK, JEFFREY HARRISON, CALEB NOLEN, and ALEXANDRA WATSON.

Contents:

  • Rebecca Morgan Frank  |  I hold with those who favor fire
  • Jeffrey Harrison  |  Hazards, 2020
  • Caleb Nolen  | The Deal
                           | Jonah Years
  • Alexandra Watson | when the party’s over or, portrait of an addict zero days sober or, my mom sent me this book healing the addicted brain 

  

  

February 2021 Poetry Feature
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December 2020 Poetry Feature: Denise Duhamel and Jeffrey Harrison

Poems by DENISE DUHAMEL and JEFFREY HARRISON

 

This month we welcome back longtime contributors Denise Duhamel and Jeffrey Harrison to our pages.

 

Table of Contents:

            Denise Duhamel
                        – 2020
                        – American Sestina, 2019

            Jeffrey Harrison
                        – The Mount

December 2020 Poetry Feature: Denise Duhamel and Jeffrey Harrison
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