VQR Online

You were afraid to open, but when you did,

There she was asking to borrow a candle. 

If this were a novel,
it would begin with a character,
a man alone on a southbound train

A container ship the size of a prone Chrysler Building slides silently past me, at eye level, close enough to touch. Multicolored intermodal containers, the red blood cells of global commerce, are stacked a hundred feet high on the deck...

I remember when my body
was a friend,

when sleep like a good dog
came when summoned.

Chris Ware contributes the second installment of “Jordan W. Lint,” a “serialized pictorial fiction,” to the Spring 2008 issue of VQR. Ware’s new project tells the story of the fictional Jordan W. Lint by illustrating single days from each...

Dulce Pinzón wanted to revise our idea of superheroes.

As a photographer living in New York in the days after 9/11, she became fascinated by the intense images of extraordinary heroism on that day—heroism that, she is quick to point out...

Well, here we are again, old friend, Ancient of Days,

Eyeball to eyeball. 

This is a story about heroes. Yes, it is also a profile of a famous man, a “celebrity,” I suppose, but it is first and foremost a story about heroes, what they mean, and the draperies of significance with which we decorate them. The hero in...

To save her, they had to cut her brain in two,
Had to sever nerves, strip one lobe almost bare—
It left her blind.