At Length

literature that looks good on a laptop

admin

  • Forty-nine
    Forty-nine

    |

    “To lift and see my hands. To see my elbows in a headstand. There went the earth, pressed down. There I went, up from what was dragging me.” A new essay on surprise, yoga, shooting, and writing from Colette LaBouff.

  • The Devouring
    The Devouring

    |

    “[H}e has outlived // everything but the taste / of his sons’ hair when gently / he kisses them incessantly // at the altar of their sleep.” In a new poem from Adam Tavel, Goya’s savage image of Saturn inhales decades of violence.

  • Four Poems
    Four Poems

    |

    “I must learn / the language of rain / to speak to plants.” A handful of new poems from Tyree Daye summon the dead and the living, family and prayer. “If there is something perfect in life,” he writes, “let it come now.”

  • Elegy for the Routine
    Elegy for the Routine

    |

    “His voice unzips / the few words he has formed // for this purpose, what he says / of coming apart.” The insidious dementia of a father fractures, assembles, retrieves, and unties in a new poem from Lauren Camp.

  • An Arsenal of Sand
    An Arsenal of Sand

    |

    “Anger in our family was like the water: it had to go somewhere. Rise up, sink down, or burst everywhere at once.” An excerpt from Angela Palm’s Riverine: A Memoir from Anywhere but Here.

  • There Was and How Much There Was
    There Was and How Much There Was

    |

    “The walls don’t have ears here. / Everybody is a woman here.” Zeina Hashem Beck weaves the conversations of women at a party into a world of song.

  • Gest
    Gest

    |

    “When time breaks you can feel it in your body at noon when half the day is done and again at 3 pm when you are going home.” Page Hill Starzinger’s poem of her parents’ decline tries to restore the house they can no longer keep. “No, my father said, don’t do that, it’s not a good house.”

  • Seismodiptych: Skyline Aftermath
    Seismodiptych: Skyline Aftermath

    |

    “A creak / A creaking / Your earth / Split and splayed” A crown of new poems from Ruth Ellen Kocher loops through outsets and aftermaths.

  • Selections from Rave
    Selections from Rave

    |

    “Gramercy, that you sang in clicks to say / That all the world is stirring / And alive.” Six new songs of praise from Marly Youmans gather brilliance from the likes of dragonflies, sorrow, and marbles.

  • Poetry Ha Ha
    , ,
    Poetry Ha Ha

    |

    “Theories of comedy are no more comic in themselves than theories of sexuality are sexy.” Robert Archambeau digs into ideas of comedy and the poetry of Aaron Belz.

  • My Name Is A Saving Aphasia: Or, the Biography of Questions
    My Name Is A Saving Aphasia: Or, the Biography of Questions

    |

    “What’s the word for…?” Philip Metres tells a life story in looking for words.

  • Migraine Season
    Migraine Season

    |

    “Something terrible has to happen. I tell my student to complete the sentence: This is a problem because….” Victoria Kornick’s long poem in prose meditates on power, art, men talking to women, men abusing women, and trying to tell all the truth.

  • Transference

    |

    Playful, inventive and profoundly sad, this verse drama from Craig Morgan Teicher pits an 18-year-old Craig and his psychotherapist against each other and against his mother’s death.

  • ,
    Takuji Hamanaka

    Talking with artist and printmaker Takuji Hamanaka about his hybrid woodcut and collage works: radical displacements from his training in traditional Japanese woodblock printmaking.

  • from Barbie Chang
    from Barbie Chang

    |

    “Barbie Chang’s mother made her / wear two pair of // underwear no wonder she is weird.” In an excerpt from her latest sequence, Victoria Chang turns not fitting in into both a distressing image of American life and an occasion for linguistic delight.