At Length

a journal for literature that’s long

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  • The Deal
    The Deal

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    “My mother’s doctor tells me, here’s the deal / She has six months to live, a year at most.” In a poem whose tight form makes music of insufficiency, Lesléa Newman tries to record the loss of her mother.

  • Albums At Length: Shearwater’s Fellow Travelers
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    Albums At Length: Shearwater’s Fellow Travelers

    “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.

  • 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.”