VQR Online

The surge in the number of unaccompanied minors crossing the US border is so alarming that President Barack Obama described it as “an urgent humanitarian situation.” Following the president’s comments, the federal government announced a $2...

We are tired of arguing about who is the most hurt.
Better to toddle off for a little Chinese.
The locust flowers each year like cornmeal in the gutters.

Spark, then fire begins. Fire pulls oxygen
deep into the box. Come, child, there’s something
I’d like to show you in the back of this

Adam Phillips’s new study, Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst, is an effective breviary and defense of Sigmund Freud, and not because it dazzles with a tightrope act of theory, but because it simply and directly underscores Freud...

Time passes
into the limbs of the boys
on the field stretching

Gathered in the yard, shed-side, pokeweed, 
black walnut, pecan tree all leafed and 
umbrellaing. My grandmother, the relatives

Every April we unsheathed sofa cushions from their glassy wrappers,
perched tea on our laps, and became an audience for his four-decade

From late 1933 to New Year’s Day 1935, Patrick Leigh Fermor walked from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul with little more than Army surplus clothes, The Oxford Book of English Verse, and some empty notebooks in his rucksack.