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Familiar Stranger
“Sliced in half, / I hold this rolling sound, / this heart shaking off / its hinges,” Jane Wong writes, shuffling, arranging, seeking connections. “The small heat of my arm nestles / in among the pines.”
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A Magic of Bags
“Sometimes, she was sure of it: she would create no family, no children, nothing but herself.” A teenage misfit makes her way in Harlem in “A Magic of Bags,” a story from Mecca Jamilah Sullivan’s forthcoming collection, Blue Talk and Love.
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Natural History
“We are in a great dying,” Robin Beth Schaer writes to her infant son, pulled by love for him into the the history of a world in decline. “Intricacies / of milk and sleep dismantle me. I empty / myself into you, hollowing by the ounce. // There are seven white rhinos when you are born. / A year later, six.”
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Never So Much Seething: Twenty-Five Liner Notes and a Poem for Fugazi
A look back at youth and Fugazi by Philip Metres.
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Two Movies
“look at what the lord has made. / above Missouri, sweet smoke.” Danez Smith scripts heartbreaking films of racism, violence, anger, grief, endurance, and love, concluding, “I believe when a person dies / the black lives on.”
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Scrawl–Punk Rock for Grown-Ups: A Retrospective
“. . . the history of women making rock music is a history of women finding ways to give those qualities feminist ends: ‘Rebel Girl, you are the queen of my world.'” Stephen Burt looks back at the grown-up punk of Ohio’s Scrawl.
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Shooting the Skulls: Devotionals
“No skull stays silent. Each spills its neglects.” In a brilliant new sequence of sonnets, Paisley Rekdal tries, in a time of war, to find voices for the abandoned skulls unearthed on the grounds of the Colorado State Mental Institution.
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Light
“What did her eyes that gleamed with the glow of extinguished silver see as she was peering into the afterlife?” In this translation from Fady Joudah, Amjad Nasser turns his dying mother’s prayer for him–“May God light your way”–into a meditation on the nature of light itself, wondering all the while, “Is remembering my mother a pretext to write about Noor/Dao, or is writing about them a pretext to remember my mother?”
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Telephone Project #2
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A. Van Jordan, Allison Benis White, Andre Hulet, Aracelis Girmay, David Caplan, David Yezzi, Ed Skoog, Erika Meitner, Ernest Hilbert, Gerald Maa, H. L. Hix, J. P. Dancing Bear, Jason Schneiderman, Jennifer Chang, Jennifer Kronovet, Jenny Browne, Joanne Diaz, John Murillo, Kathryn Stripling Byer, Kazim Ali, Kimiko Hahn, Kristina Jipson, Marilyn Nelson, Meena Alexander, Paula Bohince, Roger Sedarat, Ross Gay, Ross White, Tara BettsA conversation in poems, featuring original work from Kimiko Hahn, Aracelis Girmay, John Murillo, Roger Sedarat, Jason Schneiderman, Jennifer Kronovet, Ross Gay, H. L. Hix, A. Van Jordan, Marilyn Nelson, Allison Benis White, Kathryn Stripling Byer, J. P. Dancing Bear, Meena Alexander, Paula Bohince, Tara Betts, Kristina Jipson, Ernest Hilbert, David Yezzi, Joanne Diaz, Kazim Ali, Ed Skoog, Erika Meitner, David Caplan, Jennifer Chang, Andre Hulet, Gerald Maa, Jenny Browne, and Ross White.
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Notes for a One-Man-Show: An Interview with Chad VanGaalen
“…so then I just pull the cap off my marker and start to draw so that’s what I’ve kinda been focusing on lately. At the end of the day I get a lot of ideas from my drawings for sure, for music, at least.” Musician and visual artist Chad VanGaalen talks pedal steel guitars and cartoons with At Length Magazine.
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Scavenger Loop
“Who would I show it so unprocessed to—” David Baker rummages through dozens of texts, finding words for his mother’s death in an America of endless manufacture, modification and forestalled decay.
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Antiphon
“It occupies me: this errand out of narrowness.” Christina Davis’s slender lines send the self out in search of the world, “Thru self to arrive / at selves and thru selves / the self again—”
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Until The Beast Was Slain
“repurposed rubble erect / for these dirt counties’ / mad whelps reluctantly / the pity funds trickle.” Adam Tavel reconstructs the horrors of the Wicomico County Almshouse, twice obscured.
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The Night Grove
“The torturer wants to know how one minute blood, one minute / snow. ” In a room where “fictive or lesser / realities kept entering,” Kerri Webster encircles the ghosts of violence, tenderness, and fear.