At Length

literature that looks good on a laptop

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  • 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.

  • ,
    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.

  • 4D
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    4D

    At Length talks to musician and composer Matthew Shipp about his new record 4D, his influential work as curator of the groundbreaking and genre-smashing Blue Series for Thirsty Ear Records and his often difficult relationship with the jazz establishment.

  • The Residue of God & After the Waiting Room

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    In two new poems, Kimiko Hahn talks to one of Elizabeth Bishop’s best-known works and traces a history of beauty, investigation, authority and error reaching to the present.

  • Dark Adaptation: Milan, 1510-11

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    Da Vinci’s sketches of his stillborn child, still in utero, frame an expectant father’s thoughts on the desire for knowledge and the persistent expectation that something closer to the center remains to be seen. By David Hawkins.