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.

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. 

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.

A sheet of ground glass is useful for manual focusing in photography. With a ground-glass viewer inserted at the back of some large cameras, the image appears upside down, in vivid detail.

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