Robert Polito speaks with poet Susan Wheeler as her Ledger and Record Palace were about to be published.

From his investigation of maritime space to his extensive travels to world seaports, Allan Sekula’s trajectory transforms and connects domains that aren’t usually compared. His practice has extended from photography into filmmaking and recently, curating.

Artist William Wegman has been an early music aficionado since he was a graduate student in the mid-‘60s. when he met George Steel, the Miller Theatre’s impresario who started the encyclopedic Composer Portrait Series, they had plenty to discuss.

Despite their very different cultural backgrounds, Tuymans and Marshall find common ground in their views of making and viewing art: its capacity to convey meaning, its frozen moment captured, its physicality, its value and effect.

Writer Rachel Kushner examines the lineage of common themes and recurrent imagery in July’s extraordinary body of work.

Over the past four decades, Tony Conrad’s legendary work in minimalist music, experimental film and video, has been seminal in the development of those art forms.

Edge Theater Company produces unequivocally complex new American plays that bring a provocative mix of dark humor and ardent wit to bear in their exploration of life’s messy contingencies. Carolyn Cantor directed their latest, Orange Flower Water.

“I start with an uneasiness. Somewhere a pattern’s undersung.” Thus is Heather McHugh inspired to one of her witty, contradictory, perspicacious, sometimes bawdy, always sense-soaked poems. She’s also just won a McArthur grant.

III: The Voyager Returns

It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes at the movies the projectionist will accidentally thread the wrong reel.

Henry wanted me to help him get rid of a hand. It wasn’t just a hand. That’s what he said at first, but Henry never gives you the whole story right up front. It was a whole cellar full of parts. 

“I start with an uneasiness. Somewhere a pattern’s undersung.” Thus is Heather McHugh inspired to one of her witty, contradictory, perspicacious, sometimes bawdy, always sense-soaked poems. She’s also just won a McArthur grant.

Saul Ostrow on Paul Ramirez Jonas’s optimistic quest for inventiveness and adventure.

Laurie Simmons on the fun, worldly sculptures of John Newman.

Nancy Barton on how Sue de Beer’s video installation Black Sun explores death and effectively and empathetically channels the teenage experience.

“What exactly are ‘comics’?” asks a resident of the town of Ice Haven, who functions as a kind of meta-guide on our descent into the underworld of Daniel Clowes’s latest imagining.

Spanning the distance between the living room and the mythic desert surrounding the Tucson barrio, between Erik Satie and Max Roach, John Covertino’s home-recorded Raglandtransmits an intimate immensity, a space Rilke contemplated when he wrote, “the world is large, but in us it is deep as the sea.”

Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s training as an architect may not be immediately perceived in his trippy and moving Tropical Malady.

While newfangled literary stars boom and bust, Harry Mathews remains largely unread.

When writer and photographer Bill Carter showed up in Sarajevo in the midst of the Bosnian War, shattered by the recent death of his girlfriend Corrina and struggling to find meaning as far from home as he could get, he had two college degrees under his belt, $200 in cash in the toe of his right boot, and barely an idea of which of the fighting factions in the civil war he’d entered he believed in. 

Jim Hodges’s work has always had its playful side.