@commonmag.bsky.social
The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, poetry, and art with a modern sense of place. Based at Amherst College, we highlight writers and work from around the world.
"Weโre holding to the terms by which we leased / our righteousness (and watch it fade and fall apart)."
Nathaniel Perry questions the way we distance ourselves from injustice in his new recording of his poem, 37 (Song, with People on the Street). Listen below!
10/18! Farmworker Portfolio @Litquake in the San Fransisco Botanical Gardens.
Join Issue 26 contributors Nora Rodriguez & Amanda Mei Kim + Jaime Cortez for a celebration of writing and art from the seasonal, migrant, and immigrant farmworkers behind California's agriculture.
buff.ly/Gc1OOdl
Stop by the Boston Book Festival on 10/25 for our free panel discussion with translators Julia Sanches, Jennifer Jean, and Sekyo Haines! Moderated by TC editor-in-chief Jennifer Acker, these writers will discuss how translation can expand our sense of place.
Find more info at buff.ly/eug7UDF!
"She hates forming meatballs in her hands, digging in the sticky mass again and again. They pull the awful lump from between her legs. "
"Knives, Tongues ," by Simonรฉ Goldschmidt-Lechner.
Translated from the German by Melody Makeda Ledwon.
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"Would this mean we are listening / to the same song / everywhere / all the time?"
Lisa Asagi submerges into dark and resonant waters with her poems and whale sculptures in this month's poetry feature. Explore the depths on our website!
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"I had carried the weight of dependency for so long, yet I felt its absence not as the lifting of a burden but as the carving of a cavity"
Ben Tamburri explores loneliness and comfort during a return to a familiar Wisconsin town. Check out his dispatch below!
"The gods must have been giant children squeezing drip sandcastles from their palms, back when this land was at the edge of a sea."
Read Eli Rodriguez Fielder's "The Garden of the Gods" on The Common now:
"I know you think that evil always fades / like grass"
In 37 (Song, with People on the Street), Nathaniel Perry questions our self-righteousness in the face of injustice. Check out his new recording of his poem below!
"Those incredibly long notes / bending far back into silence."
Delve into the waters of this month's poetry feature! Lisa Asagi explores whales and whale-calls in this collection of poems and sculptures. Click the link below!
buff.ly/uPRTr1X
"Why donโt they love? Why donโt they care? Those are not real people at my table, the child finally decides. Those are creepers."
Phoebe Hyde examines what responsibilities we have to the people we read about or watch on screens in her new story, "Raspberries." Check it out below!
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In "The Garden of the Gods," Eli Rodriguez Fielder takes a trip through the heart of the Midwest, navigating parenting, road trip mishaps, and the tension of being queer family in the current political climate.
Read our latest dispatch now: buff.ly/JVaUlHF
"Loss upon loss settling / Under a lattice of ice."
As winter draws closer, listen to Phillis Levin read his short-but-sweet "December Tanka" poem published in Issue 29. Now on our website!
"In his eyes I had become the unicorn he had so sought to produce: someone who had, in the most acceptable terms, separated himself from our familyโs dysfunction"
Jim Shepard's new poetic essay "The Acrobat" vaults between a love of literature and family history. Read now!
"It was easier for me to pretend you were just 'abroad,' as you often were, 'in Syria,' in some distant elsewhere, and not dying a few streets away"
Aya Labnieh's "Damascene Dream" searches for a phone line with the dead.
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"You say you just stumbled on my story like a tripwire? And you didn't mean to be here at all?"
Phoebe Hyde's metafictional piece, "Raspberries," draws readers into an especially dark and intimate common: a kitchen, a yard, a basement in someone else's wartime. Check it out below!
"Itโs easier now to see / deep into the woods"
On our website, Phillis Levin's gentle "December Tanka" poem published in Issue 29 now features a recording by the author. Give it a listen, and let the chill of December wash over you in these hotter days.
Find The Common @ the Brooklyn Book Festival next Friday!
Join us at Books Are Magic for a panel discussion / book signing with Emily Everett, Ananda Lima, Annell, Lรณpez, & Olivia Wolfgang-Smith.
๐122 Montague Street, Brooklyn.
๐ 7PM
This event is free and open to the public.
"Visitors passing through on the way to the living room might exclaim 'Whoโs reading The History of Lycanthropy? Or All About Tornadoes?'"
Jim Shepard's essay "The Acrobat" details a childhood with books, and a father's desire to reconnect. Read from our Reading Life series now!
"Everything would be colored by irreversibility from this moment on."
During a journey to a waterfall, a man undergoes a rebirth of violence and clarity. Check out Daniela Alcรญvar Bellolio's short story, translated by Jack Rockwell.
โ'Come, come, come,' and theyโd fly, all three of them, out their cages in a flurry and land on your breasts, climb your gold chains, nestle against your cheeks."
Aya Labnieh's dream-dispatch between Anaheim, CA, and Damscus, Syria, revisits the loss of an "Ur-Mother."
โAs a child, I loved cartoons in which a character with no way out draws a door. We hit a wall and make a door. We both love hiding words inside words.โ
Phillis Levin and Diane Mehta are animated and sprawling in this recent interview, available to read now on The Common. buff.ly/iyNWi1H
September has arrived. Ring in the new month by reading this conversation between TC Contributors Phillis Levin and Diane Mehta as they unfurl the catalysts and contours that define their writing. buff.ly/iyNWi1H
08.09.2025 13:02 โ ๐ 0 ๐ 0 ๐ฌ 0 ๐ 0
"Most Saturdays, we embarked spontaneously, almost conspiratorially, in the bleary, quiet hours before Mom woke up."
Luchik Belau-Lorberg's epistolary dispatch, "From IHOP," revisits the strange intimacies of dining in a liminal space.
"Not an act, not a consequence, but life."
Against a violent backdrop of color, a man journeys to a waterfall in Daniela Alcรญvar Bellolio's short story, translated by Jack Rockwell. Read below!
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"Iโd shove the scrambled eggs around my plate. Youโre like me: easily spooked, boyish, with an awkward smile. We did our best to tell each other something of our feelings."
Luchik Belau-Lorberg's epistolary dispatch, "From IHOP," revisits the strange intimacies of dining in a liminal space.
โThatโs the right question,โ the beast said. โYouโre nobody. The question is: Who am I?โ
Need something to listen to? Now on our website, you can hear Pria Anand read her masterful myth retelling "The Elephant's Child," a feature from our spring issue.
"Light snow, bare branches. / Itโs easier now to see / Deep into the woods"
In her poem, "December Tanka," Phillis Levin reveals how the arrival of winter has the possibility to heal and offer insight. Find it in Issue 29, or check it out below!
buff.ly/KbwCijx
"The beauty of silence // scrubs clean all doubt, clears / away the brittle leaves / on sidewalks."
Ever wonder what a poet's last poem sounds like, strolling along in the early morning? Look no further than "My Last Poem," Michael Catherwood's brilliant and gentle Issue 29 piece.
"My obsession with this cloth also was what made it so difficult to write this essay."
In this monthโs podcast, Lily Lloyd Burkhalter talks about how her time in Cameroon drove her Issue 29 essay.
www.thecommononline.org/lily-lloyd-burkhalter-on-raffia-memory/
โeverything you didnโt have time to take / was like a ransom paid / for an incredibly fortunate lifeโ
Read poems from Anna Malihonโs forthcoming collection on love and nature, on becoming a refugee, translated from Ukrainian by Olena Jennings.
www.thecommononline.org/august-2025-poetry-feature/
