Editor's Desk

• Ted Genoways — The Scourge of AIDS in Africa

VQR Portfolio

• Philip Alcabes — Heart of Darkness: AIDS, Africa, and Race
• Helen Epstein — AIDS and Africa’s Hidden War and The Underground Economy of AIDS
• Gideon Mendel — Looking AIDS in the Face: An Activist Photographic Project from South Africa and Mozambique
• Jann Turner — Nightgirls
• Charter Weeks — The Edge of Nowhere

Essay

• Helon Habila — On Dambudzo Marechera: The Life and Times of an African Writer
• Tom Sleigh — Self as Self-Impersonation in American Poetry

VQR Gallery

• Rosamond Casey — Mapping the Dark: A Museum of Ambient Disorders
• Art Spiegelman — Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@?*! (Installment #2)
• Lawrence Weschler — The Graphics of Solidarity

Fiction

• Steve Almond — Tamalpais
• Deborah Eisenberg — The Flaw in the Design
• John McNally — Creature Features
• Binyavanga Wainaina — Ships in High Transit

Poetry

• Julianna Baggott — Camille Claudel Bathing in the Lake Near Chateau D’Islette, Camille Claudel Does Not Want to See the Baby, and Camille Claudel Refuses to Sculpt Clay that Sister Saint Hildafonse Has Given to Her at the Asylum
• Will Belford — Caveman
• Erik Campbell — The Redemption of Tantalus
• Billy Collins — August and The Summer Houses
• Albert Goldbarth — Swallow
• Marilyn Hacker — Ghazal: Waiting
• Amaud Jamaul Johnson — The Maple Remains, Chicago Citizen Testifies in His Defense, and Elaine, 1919
• Dave Lucas — At the Cuyahoga Flats and The Fox
• Charlotte Matthews — To the Men Who Mow the County Graveyards
• Patrick Phillips — Fever
• Arthur Sze — The North Window
• Lisa Williams — On Not Using the Word “Cunt” in a Poem
• Charles Wright — from Littlefoot

Book Reviews

• Book Notes
  
• Jack R. Fischel — Genocide In Rwanda

Humor

• Ross MacDonald — Dead-Eye Comic
• James P. Othmer — Lost in the Amazon