Maxine Helfman‘s series of photographs challenge our fashion and gender role assumptions in a candid talk with Darren Ching and Debra Klomp Ching.

Manuel Cosentino talks with Darren Ching and Debra Klomp Ching about the big skies in his Behind a Little House series of photographs, which has captured the imagination of audiences across the globe.

“repurposed      rubble erect / for these     dirt counties’ / mad whelps     reluctantly / the pity funds     trickle.” Adam Tavel reconstructs the horrors of the Wicomico County Almshouse, twice obscured. NEW!

“The torturer wants to know how one minute blood, one minute / snow. ” In a room where “fictive or lesser / realities kept entering,” Kerri Webster encircles the ghosts of violence, tenderness, and fear.

“He’d never seen the Iliad.” Irreverent and imaginative, Philip Brady sings of Homer’s first encounter with the alphabet.

David Micah Greenberg, Idra Novey, Robert Archambeau, Jee Leong Koh, Joshua Rivkin, Connie Voisine, Sophie Cabot Black, Carmen Gimenez Smith, Jill McDonough, Keith Ekiss and Sarah Blake weigh in (briefly) on their favorite long poems.

“She felt an inkling—just the faintest tingle—then, of something gone wrong inside her; a small, vile thing, just beginning to grow.” A mother travels to Vietnam for a favorite son’s wedding in a story by Meaghan Mulholland.

“Whenever I peeked into his room at night, there he lay, open-mouthed, those frightening white feet kicked free of sheets.” Inspired by Joe Brainard, Jeff Oaks invents a form for generating truths.

“Before Liberation, emperors had idled there, among pleasure grounds of lakes and pavilions, and it was said you couldn’t look directly into its gates or your vision would blur.” Third Daughter is recruited for a ballroom dance troupe at the home of the Chairman in this excerpt from Vanessa Hua’s novel-in-progress.

“Their affection, any love—good or bad—had me. I was the fool for love.” Ben Miller remembers his induction into an exclusive, eccentric group of writers in the prologue to his forthcoming book, River Bend Chronicle: The Junkification of a Boyhood Idyll amid the Curious Glory of Urban Iowa.

“Being a wordsmith has its own particular baggage that is perhaps a bit different from other avenues of artistic expression. Even a visual artist has the choice to go beyond representation, but most writers, to some degree, must rely on narrative.” Eric Gansworth looks back ten years after Death Cab for Cutie’s break-out album, Transatlanticism.

“Probably every artist—no matter their art—has a moment of wondering what they can bring to the world that is new. The ultimate criterion for artistic genius seems to be originality. But as one of my friends said, ‘Nobody gives a bloke a hard time for recording Mozart, do they?’” Ayse Papatya Bucak kicks off our Albums At Length series with a look at Shearwater’s Fellow Travelers.

Seattle bassist and composer Jherek Bischoff talks about how his life growing up on the high seas prepared him for the extremely DIY recording process for his new art-pop album Composed.

Saxophonist Colin Stetson combines jazz musicianship, rock songcraft and the physicality of a grand slam final to create a truly unique and atavistically compelling sound. Stetson took a rare moment of mid-winter’s rest to talk to At Length about his breakout year, his physical limits and his rather daunting New Year’s resolution.