VQR Online

The kitchen cupboards were the last to be sorted out. My father gaped at the size of the throwaway pile in the front hall. “Would I do this to you?” 

It is through Edwidge Danticat that Haiti emerges beyond the illusion, and her fiction and nonfiction open our eyes to the history and complexity of the island.

Merwin’s awesome range, intensity, and feral strangeness are evident in a new two-volume Library of America edition, beautifully edited by J. D. McClatchy. Nearly 1,500 pages in all, it represents an oeuvre so large as to make Robert Lowell...

Bending over the piano,
or putting the oboe to her lips,
she makes music the way a tree 

What’s the difference between blues and rhythm and blues?

First and second books of poems come in two general flavors. The first is an omnibus collection; it shows us a young poet’s series of attempts to find her own way into the craft. The second type of early collection is cohesive, since it...

Now that Senate Democrats have defeated legislation that would have approved construction of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, Republicans are promising to push the project through when they take control of the Senate next year. But...

Eudora Welty speaks about her life and art.

In the great Archaeological Museum of Naples, 
I visited Flora—force 
behind everything that flowers—a fresco