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.
from To Banquet with the Ethiopians
“He’d never seen the Iliad.” Irreverent and imaginative, Philip Brady sings of Homer’s first encounter with the alphabet.
Breaking the System: An Interview with Kristan Kennedy
Kristan Kennedy talks with us about making paintings that may be more at home draped on a chair than hung on a wall, being an artist in Portland, Oregon, and how Miley Cyrus makes great road trip music.
Short Takes on Long Poems, Volume 6
David Micah Greenberg, Idra Novey, Robert Archambeau, Jee Leong Koh, Joshua Rivkin, Connie Voisine, Sophie Cabot Black, Carmen Gimenez Smith, Jill McDonough, Keith Ekiss and Sarah Blake weigh in (briefly) on their favorite long poems.
Short Takes on Long Poems, Volume 5
Joy Katz, Craig Morgan Teicher, Chris Tonelli, Joanne Diaz, Geffrey Davis, Erika Meitner, Ada Limón, Dave Lucas, Rusty Morrison, Averill Curdy and Lisa L. Moore weigh in (briefly) on their favorite long poems.
Three Erasures
Scraping away at books from the World War II era in the Pacific, Collier Nogues exposes “the dark loud movements of war.”
Albums At Length: Death Cab for Cutie’s Transatlanticism: 10th Anniversary Edition
“Being a wordsmith has its own particular baggage that is perhaps a bit different from other avenues of artistic expression. Even a visual artist has the choice to go beyond representation, but most writers, to some degree, must rely on narrative.” Eric Gansworth looks back ten years after Death Cab for Cutie’s break-out album, Transatlanticism.
Take This Quiz
Kristan Kennedy, Rebekka Moran, Adam Forrester, Kreh Mellick, and Jason Polan respond to our sensibility quiz composed from questions stolen from contemporary poems.
The Deal
“My mother’s doctor tells me, here’s the deal / She has six months to live, a year at most.” In a poem whose tight form makes music of insufficiency, Lesléa Newman tries to record the loss of her mother.
Albums At Length: Shearwater’s Fellow Travelers
“Probably every artist—no matter their art—has a moment of wondering what they can bring to the world that is new. The ultimate criterion for artistic genius seems to be originality. But as one of my friends said, ‘Nobody gives a bloke a hard time for recording Mozart, do they?'” Ayse Papatya Bucak kicks off our Albums At Length series with a look at Shearwater’s Fellow Travelers.
What is Death
“What does infinity look like? It hurts. // Its bodilessness hurts.” In Hartsdale, when “It’s no / longer possible for anyone to stop where she is,” Kathleen Ossip wonders her way into a poem of cycling, elastic, uncertain beauty.
Exquisite Syntropy
“Honestly, I’m happy my duties end at unlocking doors and making sure nobody headbutts the Motherwell.” Photographer Bucky Miller talks with us about his day-job as a guard at a museum, collaboration, installation, and making the photographic sequence.
Maxine Helfman
Maxine Helfman‘s series of photographs challenge our fashion and gender role assumptions in a candid talk with Darren Ching and Debra Klomp Ching.
from Milk in a Pail
Thorpe Moeckel records “the way the udder / shrinks slow to shrivel after being so full” and hundreds of other entailing details that compose, in his intricate telling, the many lives that make up life on a farm.
The Long Life Hotel
“She felt an inkling—just the faintest tingle—then, of something gone wrong inside her; a small, vile thing, just beginning to grow.” A mother travels to Vietnam for a favorite son’s wedding in a story by Meaghan Mulholland.