At Length

literature that looks good on a laptop

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  • What is Death
    What is Death

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    “What does infinity look like? It hurts. // Its bodilessness hurts.” In Hartsdale, when “It’s no / longer possible for anyone to stop where she is,” Kathleen Ossip wonders her way into a poem of cycling, elastic, uncertain beauty.

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    Exquisite Syntropy

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    “Honestly, I’m happy my duties end at unlocking doors and making sure nobody headbutts the Motherwell.” Photographer Bucky Miller talks with us about his day-job as a guard at a museum, collaboration, installation, and making the photographic sequence.

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    Maxine Helfman

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

  • from Milk in a Pail
    from Milk in a Pail

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    Thorpe Moeckel records “the way the udder / shrinks slow to shrivel after being so full” and hundreds of other entailing details that compose, in his intricate telling, the many lives that make up life on a farm.

  • The Long Life Hotel
    The Long Life Hotel

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    “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.

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    Narwhals, Salt and Fractals

    Using photography as a point of departure, Christine Nguyen cuts, layers, draws, sprays and crystallizes, making both objects and works on paper that revel in a sense of discovery.

  • The Visible Boy
    The Visible Boy

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    “in the book as I remember it is surrounded by / parentheses / The illustrator / keeps him moving 



black / Parentheses like as if his brown skin struck / black / Sparks on the air with every step.” Shane McCrae’s recollection of a 1940s children’s book reanimates the terrible power of its depictions and their violent persistence in memory and beyond.

  • Soft Power
    Soft Power

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    “Your pupils widen on all / Adra prison will swallow. / Wives rock, fingering their beads.” While her husband observes political trials in Syria, V. Penelope Pelizzon wanders “the republic of poetry,” seeking language to account for their encounters there.

  • The Big Father Essay
    The Big Father Essay

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    “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.

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    Manuel Cosentino

    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.

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    Priya Kambli

    Darren Ching and Debra Klomp Ching talk with Priya Kambli about the story behind the Kitchen Gods series.

  • from The Woman With No Name
    from The Woman With No Name

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    “How to cull the fuckery that follows a woman who does as she wants?” Michael Luis Dauro’s female gunslinger chases the fantasy of violence and revels in the history-heavy liberty of words.

  • from Floodstrains
    from Floodstrains

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    “Days before death he was surprised by it,” writes David Micah Greenberg in this elegy keyed to compositions for solo piano, summoning awe “As we imagine the departed / hearing music we now hear…. As some light will never reach us.”

  • The Sea Palaces
    The Sea Palaces

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    “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.

  • Cul-de-sac
    Cul-de-sac

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    “In their baskets, they carry / small tokens of privilege that they barter / for magic beans, freedom // from our protection, from our / spurned friendship with the world.” Patty Seyburn’s neighborhood tour takes in six houses, plenty of fear and a seemingly endless appetite for more.