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.

“We are in a great dying,” Robin Beth Schaer writes to her infant son, pulled by love for him into the the history of a world in decline. “Intricacies / of milk and sleep dismantle me. I empty / myself into you, hollowing by the ounce. // There are seven white rhinos when you are born. / A year later, six.”

“look at what the lord has made. / above Missouri, sweet smoke.” Danez Smith scripts heartbreaking films of racism, violence, anger, grief, endurance, and love, concluding, “I believe when a person dies / the black lives on.”

“No skull stays silent. Each spills its neglects.” In a brilliant new sequence of sonnets, Paisley Rekdal tries, in a time of war, to find voices for the abandoned skulls unearthed on the grounds of the Colorado State Mental Institution.

“What did her eyes that gleamed with the glow of extinguished silver see as she was peering into the afterlife?” In this translation from Fady Joudah, Amjad Nasser turns his dying mother’s prayer for him–”May God light your way”–into a meditation on the nature of light itself, wondering all the while, “Is remembering my mother a pretext to write about Noor/Dao, or is writing about them a pretext to remember my mother?”

“Sometimes, she was sure of it: she would create no family, no children, nothing but herself.” A teenage misfit makes her way in Harlem in “A Magic of Bags,” a story from Mecca Jamilah Sullivan’s forthcoming collection, Blue Talk and Love. NEW!

“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.

“Punk, despite its DIY ethos and anti-authoritarianism, also found itself confronting the dark side of anarchism—skinheads whose idea of a good time involved beating the shit out of people in mosh pits under the guise of dancing.” A look back at youth and Fugazi by Philip Metres.

“. . . the history of women making rock music is a history of women finding ways to give those qualities feminist ends: ‘Rebel Girl, you are the queen of my world.’” Stephen Burt looks back at the grown-up punk of Ohio’s Scrawl.

“…so then I just pull the cap off my marker and start to draw so that’s what I’ve kinda been focusing on lately. At the end of the day I get a lot of ideas from my drawings for sure, for music, at least.” Musician and visual artist Chad VanGaalen talks pedal steel guitars and cartoons with At Length Magazine.

“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.