“And that’s when the man said to come drink with him, said he was heading east for the winter fishing, said: Tell me what you saw tonight and I’ll take those things with me. I’ll make sure to speak them into the water for the pike to eat.”
Lars Horn “With the Moths’ Eyes”
Twelve Ways to Resurrect the Dead, Which Is to Say: To Write
Poets & Writers, Jan/Feb, 2023
“In the beginning, the gods created humans as all-seeing, all-knowing. But the gods never did seek to live amongst equals, drew instead a fog across human eyes.”
Poets & Writers: The New Nonfiction
Poets & Writers, Sept/Oct, 2022
“There is a tendency to think of writing as filling, as occupying the empty space of the page. Words as dimensional, carrying weight. But what if writing is a slow erosion? The page—a monolith. I think of writing as reduction, a kind of sculpture in stone relief. Words chiselling, cutting, hammering at the rough block of a project. Until the work emerges—slow, ever more defined surface.”
What to Read When You Want to Look
The Rumpus, June 10, 2022
“There is something reminiscent of ancient burials in The Solemn Process. A sanctity normally reserved for rites of clergy. Extreme unction. Almost canopic. Lupas encased the sculptures so they might endure—what else but an embalming? Final rite and preparation for unknowable afterlife. But this solemn process, where exactly does it occur? In the design and construction? In the maintenance and preservation? Or all of these, and the final reverence: the pilgrimage to see, bear witness. When one comes to look at another’s work, at thought and gesture, at movement rendered image, object, texture. When life acknowledges life.”
On the Intimate History Between Skin and Ink
Literary Hub, June 6, 2022
“But even outside of tattooing or body modification, skin and ink share a long and intimate history, with skin frequently supplanting paper as writing support. […] As much as tattoo cultures are rooted in the arts—drawing, engraving, carving—writing cultures are rooted in skin, in ink scored across flayed, soaked, dehaired, and stretched hide. To write was, and still is, in some sense, to tattoo, to ink script upon skin.”
My Mother Photographs Me in a Bath of Dead Squid
Granta, April, 2022
“A fine art teacher, my mother led a yearly trip to Aberystwyth, Wales. During one of these trips, in the communal bathroom of a seafront B&B that hadn’t seen an update since the fifties, my mother began a photography project that would span decades of my life. I have modelled in baths, glass cases, on beds, beaches, in forests. My body covered in dead fish, offal, dried flowers, ashes. My body cast, photographed, filmed, watched by gallery audience. My mother’s instructions always: Look dead, Lars, look more dead.”
The Georgian Military Road
The Virginia Quarterly Review, December, 2021
“The last time I spoke Russian had been years before, in 2012, when I took Russian classes in Perm, a settlement located in the western foothills of the Ural Mountains. A Soviet closed city and driving force in the aeronautics and armaments industries, Perm only began appearing on maps in the 1990s, around the same time officials changed its name from Molotov and stopped referring to it as ‘Gateway to the Gulag.’”
With the Moths’ Eyes
The Kenyon Review, March/ April, 2020
“In the summer of 2014, I tore most of the muscles from my right shoulder to my lower back. After two months, the muscle tissue still had not healed. Doctors could not provide an explanation. As it turned out, I would remain bed-bound for the next six months.
Having moved back home, I slept in my childhood room. My mother put photographs of artwork on the walls: a woman holding up a dead bird, a dog next to a man slumped in a ditch. She also installed a small television set at the end of my bed so that I could watch films.
I remember keeping strange hours during those months. I also remember looking at the photographs, the television screen—images flickering into one another.”
In Water Disjointed from Me
The Kenyon Review, June, 2019
“Growing up, mirrors, weighing scales, and family photographs were banned, as were any other means of self-representation ‘without artistic intent.’ Two of the only photographs of me as a child show me in a bath of dead squid, then laid out on concrete, a pair of magpie wings resting on my back. The body was a movement, something to be articulated in space, undone in time. Not looked at. Except when that looking made it strange. When the stilling of a body might, ultimately, undo it. Lend an enduring instability.”