At Length

literature that looks good on a laptop

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    Ice Notes

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    “Glaciers! Looking at them my eye never knows where to rest,” writes visual artist Oona Stern in her journal from the Arctic Circle. Stern and composer Cheryl Leonard offer a window into their work-in-process, a series of installations employing sounds, maps, images and words recorded at the foot of calving glaciers.

  • from Labyrinth
    from Labyrinth

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    “Still the heavy kick drum of the bull-man’s gait shakes the boy’s gut,” writes Oliver de la Paz in this opulent version of an ancient myth. “Still the labyrinth gathers its boundaries in redundant corridors.”

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    Frank Yamrus

    Following a six year hiatus, Frank Yamrus reveals his I Feel Lucky series. He talks with Darren Ching and Debra Klomp Ching about his journey of self-portraiture and making the personal public.

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    Those Who Didn’t Run

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    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.

  • Homeric Turns

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    A masterful poem of suffering, storytelling and gods from Alan Shapiro, in whose hands “the rank and file/Massed for a sleep walk into corpse fires” can become, for a moment, “A figure now for storm clouds out at sea.”

  • The Classics Illustrated Comics Project

    Five brand-new comics about adaptation, by Kevin Cannon, Pascal Girard, Melissa Mendes, Andrea Tsurumi, and Noah Van Sciver.

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    WM Hunt

    With his book and exhibition The Unseen Eye showcasing one of the most singular collections in photography, W.M. Hunt talks about collecting and his tenacious passion for photography in a candid and insightful conversation with Darren Ching and Debra Klomp Ching.

  • Delusion’s Enclosure: on Harry Partch (1901-1974)

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    “LISTEN TO THAT.” Stephen Motika makes his own original music in writing the life, work and migrations of a composer who once asserted, “tongue must couple with the cavity or there’s no resonant tone. yes, this is sexy.”

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    Counting Down

    What if there were a short film for each year of your life? Julie Lequin takes up the possibility in Top 30, an ongoing video project—part storyboard, part songbook—now showing here.

  • The Monongahela Book of Hours

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    V. Penelope Pelizzon strings her time in a mining town together with stories of an early coal baron, the workers who opposed him, and the art in the museum that bears his name, hunting “Illuminations sharp/enough to catch…/dark earth’s plunge/to underworlds where men still crouch to free/the stone whose flesh is flame.”

  • Seal Wife

    A sea lion sheds her skin and takes a human husband, confronting in innocence the terrors of evolution. By Amy Parker.

  • Two Prose Pieces

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    In one of the two prose poems here, Rachel Zucker deals with a friend’s death, her unreliable memory and her fascination with another poet known only as “one.” In the other, Elaine Bleakney begins, “This is the beginning of talking to you: deer in the yard,” setting off a series of meditations that cover a terrible job, a traumatic labor, and culture shock.

  • The Showrunner
    The Showrunner

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    A hit show, a teenage star, the arc of fame, the walk of shame: A bitterly funny Hollywood fable by Frankie Thomas.

  • from The Book of the Red King

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    Marly Youmans’ chronicle of a fool in search of his king is a rollicking tour through the traditions of English literature and the pleasures of the language itself. Introducing her hero she writes, “He shakes his rattle at the dark/And fills his antic hat with leaves.”

  • Where His Lines Run

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    Starting from a six-sentence obituary that ran in 1855, Adam Tavel crafts a riveting sequence of letters and monologues invoking suicide, infidelity, race, and the “bent trumpet of grief” that echoes over generations.