The Double Lamp of Solitude
By Poetry Issue 110
Occasionally, she would indulge / in controlled acts of remembrance, / letting the distant world intrude. / She found this sometimes helpful / to her investigations, but a little / went a long way.
Read MoreThe Lamp of Art
By Poetry Issue 110
Beginning and beginning again, / the eye opens to see the border / of its galaxy and finds there a snake.
Read MoreThe Strange Persistence of Religion in Contemporary Art
By Interview Issue 110
We’re talking here about two projects: rereading art history to recover a wider context for religious meaning, and rereading it to recover a wider sense of the art historical project. You are aiming at the first, which is the larger and more important one, but our examples have been mainly the second, which would be a tonic to the discipline.
Read MoreIn the Studio
By Visual Art Issue 110
I cut a hole in the ice each winter, an extraordinary black trapezoid—“avanto” in Finnish—intended for the bracing plunge to follow the extreme heat of the Finnish sauna. The shape carries so much personal meaning.
Read MoreThe Day of Big Trouble
By Fiction Visual Art Issue 110
How a thing looked was important. Not just Is it useful, but Is it nice to look at. Trees made fruit, and fruit is useful, he’d said to Zeke. But before fruit comes flowers, and there’s not a thing to be done with them but look.
Read MoreTo the Ram’s Horn I Cannot Sound
By Poetry Issue 110
The sound I imagine / you make has to / hold me and wake / me to its own kind / of internal return.
Read MoreVessel
By Poetry Issue 110
But innocence / / Is not responsibility / cleansed by command / And water, lifted, can but flee / the trembling hand.
Read MoreThe Wall
By Fiction Issue 110
Wasim’s was the only part of the family cut off when the wall was erected, the rest residing on the other side near the Israeli settlement of Gilo. From their family balcony, Gilo can be seen—ten thousand red-roofed pillars by night, one colossal cloud by day.
Read MorePlague Psalm 90
By Poetry Issue 110
A psalm for the plague year by Philip Metres: “Loss, you have been our regent, / Refusing the refugees / you sent. / / Truly we’re boxed in an annex / Of the mansion / of your text.”
Read MoreThe Unvarnished Truth
By Fiction Issue 110
Throughout the winter, Dr. Iske obsessively polished their furniture with oil. He had studied plant biology in college before going on to med school, and when he saw varnished wood, he saw the tree it had come from.
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