COMMON PRACTICE moves through the unstable languages of belonging, memory, nation, and news, asking what happens to meaning as it passes from mouth to screen, from history to habit. Across these seven poems, drawn from a larger project, signals fail, pronouns slip, countries become figures of speech, and familiar language returns subtly altered. Working through association, mishearing, repetition, and linguistic play, these poems inhabit the distance between what is said and what arrives - where “meme becomes memory,” fact might be mistaken for factory, and history remains suspended somewhere between sound and sense.

COMMON PRACTICE, Adrian Lürssen

December, 2027

11 pages

Born and raised in South Africa and then the Washington, D.C. area, Adrian Lürssen has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for over thirty years. His full-length book, HUMAN IS TO WANDER, received the 2022 Colorado Prize for Poetry (Gillian Conoley, judge) and was published by the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University. His chapbook NEOWISE was published by Trainwreck Press (Canada). His poems have been published widely, including in Fence, Posit Journal, Phoebe, Indiana Review, Witness, Boston Review, and many places elsewhere.