Editor's Desk

• Ted Genoways — The Crossing

VQR Portfolio

• Philip Caputo — Life on the Line: The Arizona-Mexico Border
• Mark Ehrman — Borders and Barriers
• Reynaldo Leal — Border Town, a photo-essay
• Charles Rappleye — Mexico, America, and the Continental Divide

Dispatch

• Nicholas Schmidle — Waiting for the Worst: Baluchistan, 2006

Essay

• Erik Campbell — The Accidental Plagiarist: The Trouble with Originality
• Pauline W. Chen — The Gross-Out Factor
• Morgan Meis — Taking Aim: Jasper Johns, An Allegory of Painting, 1955–1965
• David J. Morris — The Image as History: Clint Eastwood's Unmaking of an American Myth

VQR Symposium

• David Caplan — “That Grotesque and Laughable Word”: Rethinking Patriotism in Time of War
• Ed Folsom and Jerome Loving — The Walt Whitman Controversy: A Lost Document
• Ted Genoways — Posthumous Mark Twain
• Mark Twain — The Walt Whitman Controversy

Fiction

• Nadine Gordimer — The Second Sense
• Helon Habila — The Hotel Malogo
• R. T. Smith — Wretch Like Me

Poetry

• Robert Olen Butler — Intercourse
• Chad Davidson — Swell of You
• Robin Ekiss — Vanitas Mundi
• Alessandra Lynch — The Mice of the Mother's House and Carousel
• D. Nurkse — Anthropocene
• Gregory Orr — from How Beautiful the Beloved
• Patrick Phillips — Kitchen and 6:12
• Alberto Rios — Líneas Fronterizas / Border Lines
• Joshua Rivkin — The Next Row
• Tom Sleigh — Airport Economy Inn and Last Broadcast
• Dabney Stuart — The Light the Magician
• Luis Alberto Urrea — Walking Backward in the Dark

Book Reviews

• Book Notes
  
• Oscar Villalon — Barbarians at the Wall

Humor

• Ross MacDonald — Dead-Eye Comic