Velocities of the nearby, Talia Brown

Winter 2026

In the two-month duration of the graduate program Land Arts of the American West, now in its twenty-fifth year of operation, ten participants spend time at ~twenty sites across Texas, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, and Arizona, in durational visit to sites of 20th century Land art (Spiral Jetty, Sun Tunnels, The Lightning Field, Double Negative) alongside other sites of human mark-making on the landscape (the Jackpile Uranium Mine, the Hoover Dam, the Very Large Array). In close attention to these places, a collective poetics of partiality, of lapping, coheres. In travel on the road through the landscapes of the Southwest scoured by wind, water, industry, and agriculture, a new attendance to apparent, layered velocities. This essay will attend to the poetics of attention to site, speed and scale that has emerged in the four years I’ve spent working for the Land Arts program. To the speed of the relational, the localized and the climated, in far-horizoned landscapes.

Talia Brown is a poet and translator from Minnesota. She is a graduate of and former program assistant to the field program Land Arts of the American West at Texas Tech University. Her poetry and critical prose can be found in b l u s h and Little Mirror. She is currently an MFA student at Boise State University.