At Length

literature that looks good on a laptop

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    Splendid Derelicts

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    Poet Anna Journey follows “a kind of Elysian Ur-tricycle” through Catedral vegetal, Mexican Surrealist Remedios Varo’s sepiascape, finding the place where canopies establish, fracture, and slip for the willing traveler.

  • Black Sun Crown

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    Brian Teare enacts the haunted logic of dreams in an inventive and arresting new sequence, tracing a state in which it’s possible to “lie down in/the river where my mind meets the sea.”

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    Mario Tama

    Mario Tama talks about his five years spent photographing post-Katrina New Orleans and his newly released book, Coming Back: New Orleans Resurgent, in a conversation with Darren Ching and Debra Klomp Ching of Klompching Gallery.

  • Oh and O
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    Oh and O

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    Markus Popp’s sonic project Oval has been credited with pioneering the influential genre called “glitch.” Now, after nearly a decade of silence, Oval has returned with a decidedly new musical direction. At Length speaks with Popp about this metamorphosis and previews a new track.

  • from None Other

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    In the first section of a vital new book, Allan Peterson writes of the natural world: “There is no other/To explain where it came from is speculation like reading/water from a faucet. Beyond what we think/in our dreams or ideas it is still there/even the island of walruses.”

  • Amistad

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    Elizabeth Alexander recounts a key moment from the history of slavery in a sequence whose variety and force ask what it means to live with a brutal legacy in which “Many things are true at once.”

  • The Decisive Ones

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    In post-Shock and Awe Baghdad, a team of reporters placed its operation in the hands of a trusted Iraqi driver. In an exceptional memoir, Thanassis Cambanis reports how it all went wrong for Sa’ad al-Azawi — and for Iraq.

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    Everything in Motion at Once

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    Painter Roger White corresponds with us about beauty, detachment, the Brita filter, and all that can’t be distilled about painting.

  • Defect

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    In a sequence of prose poems about the young man who defected from the Soviet bloc and came to live with her childhood family, Jessica Fisher reflects on the ways political landscapes map themselves onto individual lives.

  • Battle Creek

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    “My obsession with Marisa Snow as a possible target began in Advanced English…” In Ann Stewart’s novella, a teenage gay bashing in Michigan’s Cereal City opens out to an exploration of rage, first love, and consequence.

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    Marc Baruth

    The art of history combined with contemporary photographic assemblage is explored with photographer Marc Baruth in a discussion with Darren Ching and Debra Klomp Ching of Klompching Gallery.

  • The Blue Word

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    Laura Christina Dunn summons memories of a beached whale and a lost love, wondering how much of how we live can be sustained.

  • selections from Holding Company

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    In an excerpt from his forthcoming book, Major Jackson uses a repeating form to make room for a roster of desires, as well as the craft they foster and fill.

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    Notes on Aura Portraits

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    Anna Von Mertens walks us through her hand-dyed and stitched interpretations of the Mona Lisa, Caravaggio’s Bacchus, Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe, and others guided by the principles of aura photography.

  • Direction Nowhere

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    Forty years ago this month, Neil Young and Miles Davis shared a bill at a theater in New York City. Nate Chinen looks at two stars whose orbits passed tantalizingly close.