VQR Portfolio

The Life and Lonely Death of Noah Pierce

Ashley Gilbertson

Noah Pierce

Noah Pierce’s headstone gives his date of death as July 26, 2007, though his family feels certain he died the night before, when, at age 23, he took a handgun and shot himself in the head. It could have been the memory of the Iraqi child he crushed under his Bradley. It could have been the unarmed man he shot point-blank in the forehead during a house-to-house raid, or the friend he tried madly to gather into a plastic bag after he had been blown to bits by a roadside bomb, or it could have been the doctor he killed at a checkpoint.

Editor’s Desk

The Price of Aggression

Ted Genoways

We, as a nation, seem to believe that, win or lose, the war is nearly finished, done with, history. Unfortunately, for hundreds of thousands of American veterans and their families, the war is anything but over.


Dispatch

Half the Sky: How China’s Gender Imbalance Threatens Its Future

Mara Hvistendahl

Young Girl

In China there are around 120 boys born for every 100 girls. That’s among the most lopsided ratios in the world, well above the United Nations recommended limit of 107, and it means that nearly 17 percent of new males don’t have a female counterpart. Even so, the figure doesn’t fully reflect the gravity of the situation.


Poetry

A Poem for the Last American Soldier to Die in Iraq

Brian Turner

To be moved by the sheer accretion / of loss, that’s what this feels like, standing / in the scrub grass and the wind, gravestones / in their ranks and files before me. It’s as if / we must make a conscious effort / to recognize our failure to remember / just who these people were.


Ruin

Todd Boss

Ruin / was rumored / to be rooming / up the road / where / a neighbor’s barn’d / burned down.
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Egrets

David Keeling

In the alluvium of / the hot afternoon, / where the day’s clarities / meet the muddy / salt currents of / evening, they resume / their pale protest / against the flocking night.
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The Lions in His Menagerie

Albert Goldbarth

And for his human guests, imperial excess straining / all credulity: say a nightingale embalmed in honey / and stuffed in a swan that was stuffed in a tenderized hog / that was levered into a slow-roast ox. . .

Fiction

Representing Doris

Peter Walpole

At some point in her late sixties, no one remembered exactly when, Doris Moat began to water her driveway. She would stand there for ten minutes, maybe fifteen, then carefully lay the hose down, walk over to the spigot by the stoop that led to her small side porch, and shut off the water.


The Iraq Show

Charles Antin

My main duties as the Production Assistant on The Iraq Show are to 1. translate the Daily Data into plain English and 2. get the coffee. I’ve only been on the job a few weeks so, for the most part, my job has been to 2. get the coffee. But today is different.
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Web Exclusives

Tributes to writer and mentor George Garrett

Read reminiscences by Richard Bausch, Robert Bausch, Carrie Brown, Kelly Cherry, Brendan Galvin, James W. Hall, Hilary Masters, Thomas McGonigle, Alan Wier, and many others.

A Few Unforeseen Things

Watch Elliott Woods’s video interviews with the friends and families of two men killed in a suicide bombing at the FOB Marez chow hall.

A conversation with poet Brian Turner

Read Patrick Hicks’s conversation with Brian Turner, Iraq War veteran and author of the acclaimed poetry collection Here, Bullet.

Recent Books

Notes from an Uncommon Reader

Sydney Blair

“Books about writing are especially useful to the beginning writer, dishing out advice and guidance before To write or not to write becomes not so much the noble question as a source of deep despair.” A review of James Wood’s “How Fiction Works.”


Humor

Dead-Eye Comic

Ross MacDonald

Bush

Plus...

Lawrence Weschler on David Hockney’s return to painting, J. Hoberman on “Lonesome Rhodes,” Blake Bailey on John Cheever’s childhood, and much, much more.