VQR Online

A library, of course, makes for a stubborn protagonist in a work of narrative journalism. “The reality is, it’s just different writing about something that has all of the complexity of bureaucracy. I don’t do a lot of stories where I have...

What realms of gold did they travel,
these old field glasses? Her last pair,
focused beyond the tame sea-stacks 
of glass and bottle, they’d have caught––
from her Boston Harbor condo–– 
birds in maneuvers, breaches of whales.

Encountering New Orleans’s Racial Undertones One Meal at a Time

You bought yourself a low-cost house
  for only forty thou’.
Then lost it in a city fire;
  they burn so often now.

It’s normal to do it alone, the feint-and-jab
           of forgetting. I believe in only what I can recite 

from memory, like the ninety-nine names
           for thirst: soft-hell, root-torn-from-soil, rain-

San Salvador’s upstart mayor, Nayib Bukele, has promised a new way forward for a city besieged by decades of violence. His biggest obstacle, however, may not be the city’s gangs, but the city’s idea of itself.

i.m. Greg Greger (1923–2015)

I. West of Chekhov

A month since Father died. Back in our old house, 
sisters, where were we? Desert of childhood, 
      great preserver, 

for you we opened another closet.
Father the farm boy––what didn’t he...

Erika Meitner’s poetry and prose, combined with photography from Ryan Spencer Reed, take us inside the city of Cleveland during the Republican National Convention.

Antje came to Spain three years ago. She worked as a hotel maid in San Sebastián, where she met Mathis and married him. He was a manager at the hotel. He was eight years older. She was twenty-four and had left Germany after her mother died...

Africanus has a million bucks, 
and still he wants and wants and wants.