Terese Svoboda | The Common

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What We’re Reading: May 2025

May 23, 2025 Reviews

The summer months, with their sprawling days, coax us to explore new literary worlds. If you’re not reading Issue 29—which features short stories from Hawai‘i, Kenya, Baton Rouge, and an Austin boxing gym—these recommendations from its contributors TERESE SVOBODA, NICOLE COOLEY, and BILL COTTER will help to revive the childhood magic of summer reading. Read on to discover poetry and prose titles that give permission, immortalize, and remind us how “fiercely beautiful” words can be.

Molly Giles’ Lifespan and Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book; recommended by Issue 29 contributor Terese Svoboda

Molly Giles’ 2024 memoir, Lifespan or the novel The Swan Book published in 2013 by Alexis Wright? The first is a perfectly wrought, very moving series of flash pieces of a life experienced above, under, around, and on the Golden Gate Bridge. The second is a wildly inventive, messy novel about the love of Australian black swans by a rebellious woman abducted from a swamp to be the wife of the Australian president. I won’t choose.

Giles’ witty and witless voice in Lifespan celebrates each of its brief but gripping narrative sections, from ludicrous encounters with wicked hyper-articulate parents, to equally challenging teenage children, to bad matrimonial choices. She faces alcoholism and we don’t blame her; she’s without a shred of emotional support. Unsentimental in the extreme, the book is a delight. Don’t do it! the reader admonishes, fully aware her own biography would never stand up to such pitiless scrutiny. Examined as daughter, wife, mother, and grandmother through the abiding lens of a determined writer, writing is the one constant. She’s so articulate about the demonic urge to write—“I just want to be able to say what I don’t yet know how to say in a way that says it so well even I understand it”—and fully cognizant that writing is what electrifies a memoir, not the events of a life. “I like the way his big hands look on the steering wheel and I like the way he sings to himself underneath the chatter of the radio,” she describes her father when she’s three, before later painful revelations set in: “The parents in my novel were cruel to their children, two-faced to their friends, casually hateful to each other. They were the parents I knew.” The Golden Gate Bridge links everything, even the consoling late relationship setting sail into the sunset below the bridge. Most memoirs are: Read it and sleep. This one will keep you up.

Alexis Wright’s third novel, The Swan Book, is a brutish dystopian fantasy set in the midst of a worldwide climate crisis. An eccentric European exile from the Climate Wars finds Oblivia hiding in the trunk of a eucalyptus after a gang rape which leaves her mute. Oblivia befriends a huge flock of black swans attracted to their shrinking Northern Australian lake, but is abducted by an ambitious indigenous politician. “He was the lost key. He was post-racial. Possibly even post-Indigenous. His sophistication had been far-flung and heaven sent. Internationally Warren. Post-tyranny politics kind of man.” Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions, the Harbour Master, Big Red and the Mechanic, a talking monkey called Rigoletto, and three genies with doctorates who, as bodyguards, come to a bad end, people her narrative. She gets everything almost any Australian girl would ever want: a handsome fairytale prince, wealth, a much-vaunted position in society— but it’s not hers. Oblivia has “a virus lover living in her brain,” meaning her indigenous culture that evokes enormous sensitivity to the ongoing destruction wrought by other cultures. Destroying a climate and destroying a people have parallels. The book reflects the Australian government’s 2007 Intervention, which disastrously changed welfare, support and policing in the Northern Territory, passed in response to child abuse allegations—although none were ever filed. Curse and spell, Wright weaves ancient aboriginal beliefs, swooping and dipping like the swans, with fairytales and ominous “real life,” using time warps and fiercely beautiful language to register the vast environmental and social disaster that we as a people, among all others, are sure to endure.

Monica Youn’s From From; recommended by Issue 29 contributor Nicole Cooley

The book most on my mind right now is Monica Youn’s amazing poetry collection From From, published by Graywolf in 2023, which I taught this month.

We discussed the book in the Queens College MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation program, in my poetry workshop called “Series, Cycle, Sequence” in which we read and write poems that invoke and trouble the idea of the poetic sequence.

What I love most about the books I teach is when they are permission giving. Youn’s collection gives so much permission. I have now read the book many times, and it continues to be a marvel. The collection offers a wide range of forms, both fixed and invented—including studies, parables, and sonigrams. The poems investigate race and racialized identity and the body through myth and art and personal experience. Many texts and figures scaffold this book: Ovid’s Metamorphosis, Korean films and TV shows, Dr. Seuss, magpies, Crown Prince Sado. A long piece near the end, “In the Passive Voice,” explores anti-Asian hate crimes and the violences of life during the pandemic.

Monica Youn’s poems are vivid and richly imagined. And constantly surprising. In the book’s first poem, “Study of Two Figures (Pasiphae/Sado),” Youn writes: “To mention the Asianness of the figures is also to mention, by implication, the Asianness of the poet. // Revealing a racial marker in a poem is like revealing a gun in a story or like revealing a nipple in a dance.”

I love what Monica Youn’s poems reveal and also what they don’t. I love the way this book confronts the reader.

Teaching a book like From From at our current moment feels more important than ever. Higher ed is under attack, immigrants are being deported, and on my own campus, as part of the City University of New York system, students are terrified for their safety and that of their families and friends. More than 168 languages are spoken on our campus. Many of our students are undocumented. Posters about how to keep ICE off campus are being distributed. None of this is distant; it is a close reality for our campus community.

So now the idea of permission—and permission giving—takes on a different valence. Yes, this book gives enormous formal permission, but also I am thinking about something more. Something I learned from talking to my students in class about the book. Monica Youn’s poems give young writers permission to speak about the worlds around them, to write about what matters, to let a poem be a space in which anything can happen.

At this terrible moment in our history and our country, our voices and our truth-telling and our poems mean more than ever. From From is essential reading.

Photos courtesy of Bill Cotter.

Amélie Suard’s Lettres à son mari; recommended by Issue 29 contributor Bill Cotter

One of the perks of laboring in the antiquarian book trade is the occasional opportunity to read something that hasn’t been read in a while. There are plenty of editions of Don Quixote and Fiore di virtù and Shahnameh that appear and reappear in this strange business of buying and selling old books, but now and then something truly forgotten turns up. In the last year several oddballs have come over the transom: an illustrated handbook for servants in royal Kyōto households in 1712; a four-page pamphlet recounting atrocities in Poland-Lithuania in 1561; an eyewitness account of an outbreak of plague in Piacenza in 1486; a book about werewolf attacks near Geneva in 1598. But the one that has really stuck with me is a book of letters, written by a woman upon meeting Voltaire in 1775, when he was almost 78 years old. The letters are all addressed to the writer’s husband. The first begins:

At long last I have reached the goal of my desires, and of my journey: I have seen Monsieur Voltaire. Never could even a vision of Saint Theresa surpass those what the sight of this great man made me feel: I felt I was in the presence of a god; but a god long cherished, adored, to whom I was finally given a chance to reveal my gratitude and my respect. If his genius had not led me to this illusion, his face alone would have: it is impossible to describe the fire of his eyes, nor the grace of his demeanor. What an enchanting smile!

The writer was Amélie Suard, a Paris salonneuse. Suard’s husband’s responses are not recorded, and Suard’s letters may have met with oblivion, too, had she not sought out, in 1802, her great friend, the translator and belletrist Guyonne-Élisabeth-Josèphine Montmorency-Albert-Laval, and asked her to print them. G.É.J-M.A.L, a former dame de palais at the court of Marie Antoinette, had retired to her château in the Yvette River Valley after The Terror, where she set up a handpress and a cabinet of type. Over the next eight years, she singlehandedly printed 17 books, all in very short press runs. One of the last works she printed was her friend Amélie Suard’s letters. Suard goes on to provide a unique glimpse of Voltaire as seen nowhere else, with asides on his generosity of spirit, brilliance, and probity. But Suard is no fool, and starstruck only momentarily— she expresses her wholesale condemnation of Voltaire’s misguided and extemporaneous passions, his loathing of Jews, and his stinking addiction to coffee. G.É.J-M.A.L, for her part, was obliged to stop printing in 1810, when an imperial decree outlawed private presses, bringing to an end one of the most unique printing houses in Europe, without which the letters of Mme. Suard would never have been read again.

Decapitated

May 5, 2025 Fiction, Issue 29 Fiction

By TERESE SVOBODA

We traveled as a group to Kenya on assignment to photograph zebra in complete abstraction, or the pores around the elephant’s flickering eyelid, or herds of giraffe clustered around salt licks like politicians deciding the fate of the country. We also drank. Fred, a Texan beer-sipper, always used a longer lens than the job needed. He worked in advertising, which meant that an assignment like this was his big chance to express himself. Franco bore his drink and our presence sardonically, a finger to the ear and always a story to accompany his glass of wine, usually about a donkey and metaphysics. It wasn’t a donkey after all was often the punchline. He was important enough that he could invite Heinemann to tag along on the trip. Heinemann’s wife was tending to an extremely pregnant NGO daughter, an activity that offered little for him, he said, personally. He was a professional magician elsewhere, not a photographer. But he was also very adept in the academic world, with an air of abstraction that suggested he had cleared collegiate hurdles in boredom. He drank vodka well. As for me, I drank gin and tonics as if they would stop malaria in its tracks. I had a name in photography, but after shooting the body for decades, my work had begun to disappear. A woman the men’s age, I had become invisible, as if I were left in too little fix.

Photography made Heinemann uncomfortable; he was an expert in everything else, or else he pleased his friend Franco by demurring to his opinion. The rest of us declaimed as if we knew every ABC in the book, but really Heinemann was the one we all envied with his academic paycheck, as evidenced by our earnest critiques of his amateurish attempts at taking pictures. Your gloating hyena is too hackneyed, we argued, the baobab against the sunset too obscene, and the dancing women adorned in beads and gold cloth are far too pretty to be pithy. Heinemann laughed and pulled a coin out of Fred’s ear. Advertising! he exclaimed. He settled on photographing the steam pouring over the car engine.

What We’re Reading: August 2024

August 23, 2024 Reviews

Curated by SAM SPRATFORD

The summer is waning, and here at The Common, we’re soaking in the quiet moments before the final stretch of production for our fall issue. Read on for recommendations from JAY BOSS RUBIN, EMILY EVERETT, and myself, for three pithy books that can help stretch out the season’s end.

Unwarranted Reticence: A Review of Eleanor Wilner’s GONE TO EARTH

August 30, 2022 Reviews

Reviewed by TERESE SVOBODA

Eleanor Wilner, a recipient of the 2019 Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry and MacArthur-winner, had to be coaxed to publish her first collection at age 42. Arthur Vogelsang, her co-editor at the American Poetry Review, “threatened various forms of physical harm if I failed to follow through.” Her reluctance, she says, was “probably a universal fear of rejection but intensified by a woman’s trained reluctance to put her own work forward.” The skid marks in resisting publication, even in Gone to Earth: Early and Uncollected Poems 1963-1975, Wilner’s ninth book of poetry, are further evidence of such modesty. On the acknowledgments page, Wilner includes an excerpt from a poem by her then-young daughter, begging her mother to publish. This is followed by “To the Reader,” a note which assures readers that the poems “belonged to the realm of imagination and not to the world of opinion,” then an italicized eight-line epigraph ending with “she much preferred / what she could not afford: / the luxury of words and light,” and a prelude poem, “Ritual,” set in prehistoric Africa, mourning the muse, “the blackened stone / that once poured fire from its heart.” Only then, a page later, does the book begin, all poems fully fledged.

Contributors in Conversation: Terese Svoboda and Ralph Sneeden

December 6, 2016 Podcasts & Audio

In this episode of The Common’s Contributors in Conversation podcast, Issue 08 contributors Terese Svoboda and Ralph Sneeden read and discuss their pieces “Dutch Joe” and “Stepping Off.”

Friday Reads: September 2015

September 11, 2015 Reviews

By TERESE SVOBODA, STEVEN TAGLE, MACEO J. WHITAKER, OLIVIA WOLFGANG-SMITH, IAN BASSINGTHWAIGHTE

Summer ends, fall begins; back to school. And as the seasons transition, we’re reading books that combine comedy and tragedy—or, as our recommenders have it, mix “humor and horror” or “poetry with play.” These are tales of “heels and faces,” each book growing “pleasurably darker” as it’s explored. This fall, embrace a little cognitive dissonance with us and choose a book that is its own mirror image; let one of these titles reflect your own many selves as you read.

Recommended:

To Drink Boiled Snow by Caroline Knox, Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, The Sweetheart by Angelina Mirabella, Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

Friday Reads: March 2015

March 13, 2015 Reviews

By CATE MCLAUGHLIN, DIANA BABINEAU, GREGORY CURTIS, TERESE SVOBODA, KELLY FORDON, OLIVIA WOLFGANG-SMITH

With the arrival of spring we’re leaping bravely into unfamiliar worlds—safe in the hands of experts, of course. An eerie peripheral dreamscape; quotidian life viewed from upside down or inside out, never as expected; the dark bureaucracy of the criminal underground; messages ferried to and from ghosts—these are unmapped terrains, and what better companions than these authors, their first cartographers? Expand your world(s) this month with these suggestions from our contributors and staff.

Recommended:

Bone Map: Poems by Sara Eliza Johnson, Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems by Billy Collins, Blood and Money by Thomas Thompson, Self-Portrait in Green by Marie NDiaye, Elegies for the Brokenhearted: A Novel by Christie Hodgen.

Review: Dragon Logic

March 3, 2014 Reviews

Book by STEPHANIE STRICKLAND
Reviewed by TERESE SVOBODA

Begin with the cover of Dragon Logic: double Garamond italic ampersands. Inverted they propose elegant dragons against a green hide background. “TWO dragons,” Stephanie Strickland writes in the eponymous poem, “keep a pearl/in the air untouched/if yes then no if no then yes.” Their “dragon logic” insists that the reader consider sets that consist of themselves, a common problem in questions of reflexivity where the self of the self-reference is a human self. This proposition enlarges the idea of the juggling proposed by John Keats’ concept of negative capability—“when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

The Writer as Foreigner: An Interview with Terese Svoboda

September 3, 2013 Interviews

ZINZI CLEMMONS interviews TERESE SVOBODA

Terese Svoboda is the author of several books of poetry and prose, most recently the novel Bohemian Girl, which Booklist named one of the ten best Westerns of 2012. Her fourth novel, Tin God, was re-issued this year. Zinzi Clemmons caught up with her during a mild August to discuss Sudan, life in foreign cultures, and multi-genre writing.

Zinzi Clemmons (ZC): Your story “High Heels,” in Issue 05 of The Common, is set on an unnamed island in the Indian Ocean where Swahili is spoken. Which country is this? Did you intend for the reader to gain a sense of a specific location through the story?

Terese Svoboda (TS): It’s Lamu, off the coast of Kenya. It should evoke the disorientation of an extreme change of location for the characters — and, of course, of an island in the Indian Ocean.

High Heels

May 1, 2013 Fiction, Issue 05, Issue 05 Fiction

By TERESE SVOBODA

There’s smoke and there’s children burning their fingers on  the cashews they pluck from the fire.

The boatman wants us to hire him, says the Swahili-speaker among us, but first this boatman is searching for wood for a new tiller. The Swahili-speaker also says not to try for the cashews in the fire ourselves. Papayas will fall, we’ll whack them down with sticks, he says. Let the children have the nuts.