In this installment of The Stack—Publishers Weekly’s social media interview series—TreVaughn Roach-Carter (PW Digital Editorial Coordinator) sits down with No Land and Anne Waldman to talk about their exhibition of poetry and art, Mercy-Eyed Down the Triple Highway, at Poets House (curator John Vincler). The two also discuss their co-authored book with Granary Books, The Velvet Wire (2024), a “telepathic exchange” of art and poetry forged through years of shared travel, making, and devotion.

From a chance meeting on a New York City street in 2012 (where a flower was exchanged) to their wanderings from New York through the American West to Mexico and back, the collaborations of No Land & Waldman conjure a lineage of poets like Shelley, Rimbaud, Corso, di Prima, Hafiz, and more. Through poem-texts, travel notes, scroll-paintings, meditations in ink and emulsion, and typewriter rhythms, No Land’s delicate visual/written worlds meet Waldman’s spells, incantations, and archival traces—dreaming toward “another kind of world.”

In this conversation, we ask about:

• Why The Velvet Wire book needed to stay handcrafted in an era of digital ease

• The exhibition’s recurring triad imagery and what it holds

• The meaning behind the exhibition title; remaining “Mercy Eyed” through travel/transition

• The role of physical archives and how the exhibition came into being

• What the poets hope visitors carry with them after seeing the work

• What comes next as the showcase enters its final weeks plans for its future tour