At Length

literature that looks good on a laptop

Poetry

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Owl Wolf Ghost

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    A host of creatures stalks the outer reaches of intimacy as Paula Bohince conjures human and inhuman, natural and supernatural wills.

  • Layoff

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    Craig Morgan Teicher responds to a lost job with a wide-ranging meditation on money, family, poetry, and responsibility, as well as the relationships that threaten to slip through the cracks.

  • In the Red Dress I Wear to Your Funeral

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    A spurned lover turns her grief into a virtuoso performance of vengeance, wit, and affection, aspiring to the moment when she can “step away free.” By Erin Belieu.

  • from Effacement

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    In an excerpt from her next book, Elizabeth Arnold weaves together medicine, history, and literature to evoke a body that is in and of the world.

  • Limbs Move Wind In

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    Kristina Jipson shifts perspectives through a series of overlapping poems that excavate rooms and reach into reflections.

  • from Critical Assembly

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    John Canaday tells the story of the world’s first nuclear weapons in the voices of the men and women who conceived them.

  • Bula Matari/ Smasher of Rocks

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    Tom Sleigh combines stagecraft, Conrad, family, nukes, colonialism, mythology, and more in a poem both intensely personal and astonishingly vast.

  • from A Night-Blue Stumble Of Gaslight

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    The adventures of L. M. Fish stretch across nearly a half-century of American history in a sequence that Tom Sleigh has praised as “an uncommonly intelligent, passionate, and tactile event.” By M. Reed Corey

  • Hydrology of California

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    Brenda Hillman’s tour of California’s rivers invokes the future of poetry; addresses the likes of Wallace Stevens, Joni Mitchell and “crazy brenda”; and leads to a prayer that borrows from present joys.

  • Sorting &Wonder of Birds

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    Two linked poems from Joanna Klink rummage through a failed relationship, struggling with the challenge of compassion, the violence of the outside world, and the wish to anchor both in something true.

  • An Immigrant Woman

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    An engine of New York City’s growth becomes a terrifying example of its failures in Anne Winters’s intricate and harrowing account.

  • The Begotten

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    James McMichael builds to an uncanny version of the Irish potato famine, invoking the forces of appetite, increase, and distant authority.