Columns

We read Paradise Lost my senior year of high school in Mr. P’s AP English class. Mr. P was married to my first-year English teacher, whose maiden name was often confused in my mind with the delicate membrane, sought after and highly...

In 2019, in the Ciro Menotti Cemetery of Modena, Italy, a couple of 1,600-year-old skeletons were discovered.

VQR columnist Laura Kolbe’s series of essays considers American art through poet and physician Kolbe’s own personal and experiential lens.

Bodies Under Siege in American Art

Sister Angela is wearing the softest robe I have ever touched. Her hearing aids are out and her dentures crunch as they settle. She is beaming at me from the dark, her face soft from sleep, her small body laundry-scented.

The copper mine in Erdenet, Mongolia, provides jobs, income, opportunities. It finances most of the city’s infrastructure. It funds a hospital. People are grateful for the mine, and proud. There’s copper everywhere in Erdenet.

Take death for a walk in your minds, folks. Either you’ll die glad you did, or, keeling over suddenly, you won’t be out anything. 

One of our body’s chief concerns is with distinguishing between inside and outside, me from NOT-me.

Traveling in Italy and Greenland in my teens and early twenties with a fitful and rudimentary cell phone, an impatience with the sweaty, masculine funk of internet cafés, and only the haziest notion of planning, I adored and relied on the...