VQR Online

The man appeared suddenly, out of the darkness and around the bend. He was standing to the side of the asphalt, near the edge of the floodlights illuminating a barricade of orange traffic barrels and, beyond, a great pile of dirt...

Deepfakes—videos altered by artificial intelligence—have begun warping our reality.

Dr. Subbarao Kambhampati, researcher and professor at Arizona State University and former president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial...

Forever you find

              your father
in other faces—

a balding head
              or beard enough
to send you following

Women used to wean their babies
By painting their breasts black.
Hurricane clouds are black.
The Earth is weaning us.

A stifling heat—the air heavy—
and all around the loud, wet forest 
knotting the gaps in its own sound.

A peace long earned, then broken;

In the fall of 2005, at the shuttle terminal of New York’s LaGuardia airport, I entered the security line and noticed, in front of me, a slight and slightly stooped older woman. After a couple of blinks, I recognized Joan Didion.

Self-Portrait of a Diabetic Life

Pink is the Tuscan sunset. Pink
Are the Vietnamese monk pates
Bobbing under Piero’s True Cross.
Pink is plenty, pink is joy.

Cutting down Chambers St. 

my pinky toenail comes clean off.

Another little ghost 

We’re a worried bunch, we Americans. We’re anxious. We’re gloomy, even doomy. We’re angsty, despairing, depressed. There’s a widespread sense that things are certainly not right with the world, and perhaps not right with us. If Dickens were...