Poetry Recording | The Common

LitFest 2025 Excerpts: Video Poems by Paisley Rekdal

February 12, 2025 Audio, Poetry, Poetry Recordings

Amherst College’s tenth annual literary festival runs from Thursday, February 27 to Sunday, March 2. Among the guests is PAISLEY REKDAL, whose book West: A Translation was longlisted for the National Book Award. The Common is pleased to reprint a short selection of video poems from West here.

Join Paisley Rekdal and Brandom Som in conversation with host Ruth Dickey, Executive Director of the National Book Foundation, on Sunday, March 2 at 2pm.

Register and see the full list of LitFest events here.

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Paisley Rekdal is the author of four books of nonfiction and seven books of poetry, most recently West: A Translation, which won the 2024 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and was longlisted for the National Book Award. The former Utah poet laureate, she teaches at the University of Utah, where she directs the American West Center.

Among Trees

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

By JAMES RICHARDSON

The Common Magazine · “Among Trees” by James Richardson

We watch the trees the way we watch the birds,
sitting more quietly than we have to,
though trees do not respond to sudden motion,
a crossing fox, a knock on the window,
or anything less momentous than the day.

The Coyotes

November 6, 2023 Issue 26, Issue 26 Poetry, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry

By JULIA LISELLA

The Common Magazine · “The Coyotes” by Julia Lisella

The coyote ambles down the middle of Chester Street
and I mistake it for its domestic cousins
but it’s stouter, a strange gray white,
directionless, undecided. My dog may know
it’s not a dog because he stares blankly back at it
without his temperamental bark and growl.

Double Infinity

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

By MARIA TERRONE

The Common Magazine · "Double Infinity" by Maria Terrone

On 88th, the street where I lived as a girl when an hour could seem an eternity, it would be years before I met the young man who pointed out that those numbers, turned on their sides, had a special meaning. What meaning? I wondered and pondered the two unbroken loops pinched at their centers, forever returning to themselves like a pair of ice skaters tracing figure eights into a state of bliss. I wondered if he thought that love is infinite, that our souls will live forever, that sky even on crystalline days moves into unseeable endless space. I was thinking that the iris of his hazel eyes pulled me into a place where I could feel lost or float before thought was possible, as if in vitro. I no longer live on 88th Street, having left double infinity in its impossible realm. Because infinity cannot be multiplied or divided—infinity just is. Still, I was grateful that I didn’t live on Main Street or Elm, and the young man I married found meaning on that finite block in Queens where he found me.

Albatross

May 8, 2023 Fiction, Issue 25, Issue 25 Fiction, Poetry Recordings

By ANNA BADKHEN

The Common Magazine · “Albatross” by Anna Badkhen

As soon as I read about the albatrosses in the Times, I thought of my big sister. Natasha.

“Natasha—albatross ty nasha,” Aunt Lyuba would sing in the communal kitchen, slinging blobs of wheat porridge into my bowl with the cornflower border. Each time she’d shuffle the bowl from the stove over to Natasha-and-my table, her felt slippers would catch on the peeling linoleum floor, and I’d worry about my breakfast. But Aunt Lyuba never slipped.

Forecast

May 8, 2023 Issue 25, Issue 25 Poetry, Poetry, Poetry Recordings

By BRIAN KOMEI DEMPSTER

The Common Magazine · "Forecast" by Brian Komei Dempster

Far from our house, winding roads
and years away. I promised we’d never
bring him here. Behind black iron gates,
brick walls smothered with ivy.

Cures

May 8, 2023 Issue 25, Issue 25 Poetry, Poetry, Poetry Recordings

By KAREN CHASE

The Common Magazine · “Cures” by Karen Chase

Light falls on ramshackle paint,
blue wooden slats, taxi pink and green tint sky,
fans paddling the outside breeze inside,
as Key West light vanishes into the Gulf.

A pebbled field with Fort Taylor at one edge,
sea at the other, objects undone by waves,
the sea, one forceful foot.

Geist

October 31, 2022 Fiction, Issue 24, Issue 24 Fiction, Poetry Recordings

By KATHLEEN HEIL

The Common Magazine · “Geist” by Kathleen Heil

At an artists’ collective near the Polish border about an hour from Berlin, I’d been taking a break from translating texts into English, a task I once enjoyed but was beginning to resent, as I was beginning to feel invisible—or was it burnt out?—in any case, I was glad to get away for a few days: it was my first vacation since I-don’t-know-when, and I’d begun to feel my soul was spent. Over lunch on my last day there, a woman from Seoul who went by the nickname Hae—a transliteration of the word “sun” in Korean, she said—asked what the word in German was for “soul.” Actually, the woman sitting next to her asked, but the woman sitting next to Hae came from Spain and was shy about her English, so when she directed the question at me I heard the word as “sol”—we’d spent the week speaking both Spanish and English—and said, in reply, “Sonne.”