Jonathan Moody | The Common

Guinea Pig Suite

November 6, 2023 Issue 26, Issue 26 Poetry, Poetry

I. Lexapro

Like a booster detached from a shuttle, my body
Ended up in an ocean while fog enshrouded my mind.
Xanax never made me feel that unsteady; it just didn’t
Agree with Lamictal. I was glad my wife could cease
Preparing herself mentally before coming home; I’d been a
Rakshasa for months & appeared to be normal
Overnight, but the low dose made me immune to emotion.

Bruh

November 6, 2023 Issue 26, Issue 26 Poetry, Poetry

By JONATHAN MOODY

after Jamaica Kincaid

be honest with your psychiatrist about how the meds have kept you from cumming:
even while fantasizing about Priyanka Chopra—her cascading curls,
tumbling down her shoulders; don’t feel ashamed after your lover has suggested
other ways to be intimate: like learning how to speak Urdu so that on sleepless nights
you can recite Ghalib’s ghazals to her while holding hands near the mango tree;
on the rare chance you’re not awake, smash the snooze button;
continue dreaming about a world where you don’t perceive that therapy
is just for white folks; forget what your family says; you can’t shake off suicidal

On Being Thirty-Six

April 15, 2017 Issue 13, Issue 13 Poetry, Poetry

By JONATHAN MOODY

after Philip Larkin

I feared these present years,

the mid-thirties,

when my receding hairline

became backed up

like rush-hour traffic on the Gulf Freeway,

& my man-boobs swelled

into Tig Ol’ Bitties.

What’s Goin’ On?

April 15, 2017 Issue 13, Issue 13 Poetry, Poetry

By JONATHAN MOODY

ca. 2008

On Marvin Gaye’s birthday, the D.J.

introduces “Sexual Healing” as the sole song

responsible for why some of his listeners exist.

If he & his wife were having trouble conceiving,

he would’ve skipped over the cliché

the way he skipped over the details

of Marvin’s tragic death, the way elders

can skip over real talk: like how, in their day,

producing classic records was as easy

as producing children.

February 2017 Poetry Feature

February 21, 2017 Poetry

Please welcome back TC contributors Elizabeth Hazen, Jonathan Moody, Daniel Tobin, and Honor Moore (whose poem “Song,” published in the first issue of The Common, was reprinted in Best American Poetry 2012). We’re also delighted to welcome Gerard Coletta, who is making his first appearance in The Common.

January 2016 Poetry Feature

January 29, 2016 Podcasts & Audio, Poetry

New Work for the New Year

This month we welcome Cassandra Cleghorn to our pages, presenting poems included in her first book, Four Weathercocks, which will be published by Marick Press in March. We’re also happy to be welcoming back TC contributors David Lehman, Jonathan Moody, and Sylvie Durbec. Lehman’s new book is Sinatra’s Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World. Jonathan Moody won the Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Prize for his collection Olympic Butter Gold, published in November 2015. The book includes five poems first published in The Common. Jean Follain Prize-winner Sylvie Durbec’s poem “Shining Red in the Torrent” is offered here in its entirety, translated by Denis Hirson. An excerpt from the poem was published in The Common Issue 10.

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.

Topical Poetry: An Interview with Jonathan Moody

February 3, 2015 Interviews

MELODY NIXON interviews JONATHAN MOODY

Jonathan Moody

Jonathan Moody is a poet and professor. His first full-length collection, The Doomy Poems, deals with time and place through persona poems, and is described by Terrance Hayes as having an “innovative funkiness that transcends the ruckus and heartache of our modern world.” Moody’s second poetry collection, Olympic Butter Gold, won the 2014 Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize and will be published in summer this year. His poem “Dear 2Pac” appears in Issue 08 of The Common, and his “Portrait of Hermes as a B-Boy,” “Kleosphobia,” and “Paranoid,” have all been featured at The Common Online. Melody Nixon caught up with Moody this winter, and between New Zealand and Texas they talked poetry activism, politics, Houston skyscrapers, and the “cosmopolitan radiance” of Downtown Pittsburgh.