ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.– To be alive is to encounter architecture. From the most solitary hermit to the most gregarious urbanite, survival itself fundamentally involves negotiating constructed spaces—huts, houses, high-rises. Architecture often plays a defining existential role in our earliest perceptions. Conjunctions:68, Inside Out: Architectures of Experience —the latest issue of the innovative literary magazine published by Bard College—comprises a narrative map of writings that investigate the vast range of architectures crucial to our being: stories, poems, and essays that center around a meaningful architectural structure or space. Edited by Conjunctions editor, novelist, and Bard literature professor Bradford Morrow, Inside Out features two new poems from the late Nobel Prize-winning French novelist Claude Simon, translated by Louis Cancelmi, as well as new work from Robert Coover, Joyce Carol Oates, Can Xue, Kathryn Davis, Elaine Equi, Robert Kelly, Ann Lauterbach, Nathaniel Mackey, Lance Olsen, Elizabeth Robinson, Joanna Scott, Cole Swensen, and Frederic Tuten, among other leading contemporary writers.
 
“To borrow a phrase from poet Elaine Equi, ‘We mark our place and it marks us,’” writes Morrow. “In this issue readers will come upon walls, and the people they protect or separate. They will discover pyramids and caves, castles and bars, seaside hotels and roadside motels, a tiny haunted house and a mansion on a Miyazaki-esque island floating in the sky. Throughout, we see the many ways in which the very materials we fashion into architectural structures reflect our deepest selves and are vivid physical extensions of our imaginations.”
 
Additional contributors to Inside Out include Gabriel Blackwell, Ryan Call, Robert Clark, Susan Daitch, Monica Datta, Karen Hays, Karen Heuler, Brandon Hobson, Lisa Horiuchi, Mark Irwin, Lawrence Lenhart, John Madera, Andrew Mossin, Justin Noga, Matt Reeck, and Mary South, and
G. C. Waldrep.