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Winter 2023

Volume 99, Number 4

In this issue, reporter Harriet Brown and photographer Lynn Johnson offer a deep dive into the impact of medicinal cannabis on children who suffer from severe illness. Faced with little to no options, in an often-hostile legal landscape, parents have turned to cannabis oil as a way to accelerate their children’s healing or offset the potent side effects of intense pharmacological regimens—often at great legal risk. The story represents years of reporting and intimate access to provide an unflinching look at these families’ experiences. The Winter issue also includes Laura Kasinof’s reporting from the remote Yemeni island of Socotra, where people find themselves at a crossroads between preserving the island’s unique ecological integrity and desperately needed development provided (with strings attached) by Arab and European speculators.

This issue also features a pair of unique essays: Boyce Upholt on one artist’s response to the Great Silence of our galaxy; and Sarah Fuss Kessler on her experience leaving a cult, and how it led to a reexamination of the cult defector’s narrative.

The fiction is dedicated entirely to Saskia Vogel’s standout translation of Linnea Axelsson’s Swedish family saga, told across layers of a mother’s memories. Garret Keizer reflects on the underestimated sublimity of gratitude, and Laura Kolbe takes a fresh look at artist Edvard Munch’s landscapes. Andrew Zubiri brings us a #VQRTrueStory on Abaca from the Philippines; Anuj Shrestha contributes an especially poignant Open Letter; and Jim Coan wraps up his run as the Drawing It Out guest columnist with the final installment of “Our Social Baseline.” Poetry from Daniel Halpern & Robert Hass, Austin Segrest, and the late Andrea Werblin Reid round out the issue.

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Fall 2023

Volume 99, Number 3

In the Fall issue, physician and writer Emily Silverman reports on the quixotic movement in health care known as direct primary care, or DPC. Through the DPC model, physicians fed up with the conventional business model of health care strike out on their own, offering a subscription-based service to patients, which in turn allows doctors and patients more time to build stronger relationships, and break free from the bureaucratic madness that plagues so much of the American health-care experience. The biggest question is: If DPC is as good as it seems, why isn’t it more popular?

The essays in this issue are rooted in memoir. In each, the author learns a bit about themselves through their relationships with outside forces—whether a daughter, Hollywood monsters, or even a resilient river in an industrial town. Peter Bebergal, Nicole Graev Lipson, and J. C. Lee deliver these remarkably original works that take a fresh look at the familial and the familiar.

The portfolios offer radically different takes on the human condition. Robin Alysha Clemens has spent the last several years documenting the lives of members of a Ukrainian homeless community that has been reshaped by the war; Margeaux Walter, meanwhile, uses subtle but nonetheless stunning juxtapositions of figures and landscapes to ask sobering questions about the impact of the anthropocene.

The fiction in this issue, illustrated by Anna Schuleit Haber, includes Regina Porter’s historical short story “Horatio’s First Gun,” imbued with rich details of an early-twentieth-century Southern town; Taisia Kitaiskaia’s dark comedy “Engelond,” one part gothic and one part absurdist contemporary detective story; and Shannon Sanders’s “The Opal Cleft,” which settles in on a tension between cousins that eventually illuminates the unspoken regrets, affections, and envy that color so many family bonds. VQR’s Emily Clark Balch Prize for Poetry winner Martín Espada leads off a section that also features work by Tiana Clark, Marisa Tirado, and Nick Flynn. And columnists Jim Coan, Laura Kolbe, and Anuj Shrestha round out the issue with columns on the science (and imperative) of cooperation, the strange timing of retrospectives in the art world, and the constancy of being plugged in in contemporary life.

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Spring/Summer 2023

Volume 99, Number 1

This special double issue of VQR features our biggest photo portfolio to date. “The Queens of Queens City” is photographer Michael Snyder’s longform photo documentary—nearly a decade in the making—of the lives of drag queens in Cumberland, Maryland, in northern Appalachia. Accompanied by an essay by oral historian Rae Garringer, this project is an immersive narrative that tells the story of Cumberland’s drag troupe, from extravagant performances to the frenzy of backstage and even the quietly prosaic moments of daily life. In doing so, it also offers a more complex picture of a region too often narrowly defined as rigidly conservative, but whose culture and politics are much more nuanced. The issue also includes fiction by Paul Yoon, Lydia Davis, Ximena Blanco, Eleni Linas, and Fredrick Kunkle. Essays by Roger Reeves, William Todd Schultz, Alessandra Colaianni, and Diane Mehta. There’s also reporting by Meg Bernhard on an increasingly popular but just as controversial form of psychotherapy known as EMDR. With poetry by Colin Channer, Anders Carlson-Wee, Shara Lessley, Jesse Nathan, and Carol Moldaw.

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Winter 2022

Volume 98, Number 4

The Winter issue brings together a range of provocative work distinguished by risk-taking and uncommon perspectives on familiar themes. Scholar Ed Pavlić reflects on the meaning of his insistence to live a racially nonbinary life, a nuanced self-definition that defies the polarized racial categories of contemporary American culture. Elsa Julien Lora addresses an all-too-common but woefully under-discussed health-care issue among Black women—uterine fibroids—as a vehicle for an intricate meditation on Black maternal health care and female legacy. Photographer Kris Graves approaches the catastrophe of California’s wildfires almost counterintuitively, long after the blazes are out, to build a visual narrative of the landscape’s uneasy new normal. Fiction by Farah Ali, Kalani Pickhart, and Jenzo DuQue takes us from student protests in Karachi to Ukraine in the Second World War to tense US–Colombia relations around the turn of the twenty-first century in Cartagena. Meghan Flaherty dives into the strange trend of ecosexual marketing online, while Kate Zambreno finds symmetry in—of all places—the monkey house of a Paris zoo. Megan Buskey and Dionne Ford contribute to the #VQRTrueStory project; columnists Jim Coan (Drawing It Out), Raj Telhan (Human Practice), Laura Kolbe (Art & the Archive), and Anuj Shrestha (Open Letter) return; and poetry by Diedrick Brackens, Martín Espada, Dave Lucas, and Lisa Russ Spaar.

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Fall 2022

Volume 98, Number 3

The Fall issue features two standout portfolios: One is by reportorial illustrator George Butler, whose drawings document his time in Ukraine during the war with Russia, complemented by an essayistic journal that details his encounters with everyday Ukrainians navigating the trauma of conflict. The second portfolio is by photographer Brian Palmer, who shares a multiyear project illuminating the rich tradition at the heart of the Black funeral profession in America, which became profoundly important in the era of COVID-19. Other features include Ben Mauk’s essay on the origins of the plague and its evolution over time, while Eric Borsuk gives insight into the experience of finding his voice as a writer in an American prison. Clement Gelly and Oona Robertson contribute to the #VQRTrueStory project; columnists Jim Coan (Drawing It Out), Laura Kolbe (Art & the Archive), and Anuj Shrestha (Open Letter) return; there is fiction by A. J. Bermudez, Simon Han, and Carrie R. Moore; and poetry by Sylvie Baumgartel, Andrés Cerpa, John Freeman, Jordan Honeyblue, and Alyssa Jewell.

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Summer 2022

Summer Fiction

Volume 98, Number 2

The third installment of our biannual Summer fiction issue brings together an eclectic mix of stories showcasing a range of modes and voices, featuring fiction from the confessional to the surreal. All the stories here share a disposition to exercising different kinds of tension, which manifests in hard ethical choices, the impulse and consequences of betrayal, even a tension between realism and the fantastical. Complementing the special fiction section is an essay on the promises and shortcomings of English as a second language (in particular, as the language of new beginning for migrants in Europe) along with a photo portfolio on the unsettling sublimity of an evangelical mecca in the Ozarks.

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Spring 2022

Volume 98, Number 1

VQR’s Spring issue tends to coincide with a buoyant season. But just as the most recent surge of the coronavirus pandemic has ebbed, war has broken out in Europe. Anxieties are piling up, and yet people seem determined to step stubbornly into some semblance of an outdated normalcy. If anything, this spring is a conflicted and bittersweet season. The work herein—including Claire Rosen’s unforgettable cover image—embraces that tension. It’s a tension that animates Ellyn Gaydos’s feature essay on love, death, and life on a New York pig farm, where the brutal and the sublime intertwine daily. Conflicting sentiments run through other works: cruelty and tenderness in a boyhood memoir by Joseph Earl Thomas; Miranda Featherstone’s essayistic reflection on commitment in the face of agonizing losses; Ara Oshagan’s photo portfolio on disconnect and ritual among the Armenian diaspora; and a suite of fiction—by Karin Lin-Greenberg, Evgeniya Dame, and Gothataone Moeng—featuring familiar pasts fast dissolving into uncertain futures.

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Winter 2021

Volume 97, Number 4

VQR’s Winter 2021 issue engages questions of identity—how we perceive ourselves and others, and how those perceptions change. In one essay, Peter Trachtenberg reassesses his understanding of his father’s migration story—and by extension the man himself—through documents he inherited after his father’s death, comparing the ink on the page to the man in the flesh that he knew. Lars Horn’s essay turns the microscope inward, to look at self-transformation and self-discovery, brought to the fore through an unexpected pilgrimage. In a wry, shrewd memoiristic essay, JoAnna Novak reflects on the suspended joys of excess by realizing, to her surprise, that what she longs for in the midst of the pandemic is the luxuriously open-ended all-you-can-eat buffet. These pieces are complemented by others on one-dimensional narratives, the unreality of social media intimacy, the transformative power of tragedy in youth, and even the unexpected rebirth of an idyllic landscape that had been written off as a site of environmental ruin long ago.

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Fall 2021

Volume 97, Number 3

The Fall issue features a portfolio by the artist Alicja Wróblewska, whose beguilingly vivid sculptures give shape to the impact of consumer plastics on the world’s oceans. Reporting by Lois Parshley examines the fallout of neglected radioactive waste in Washington state, and how its mismanagement is part of a larger pattern of neglect across of the country. Emily Maloney reflects on the complicated origins of the opioid crisis in an essay that also looks to what might lie ahead for both chronic-pain sufferers and doctors alike. The fiction rides three distinct waves of tension—through dissolution, reunion, and fragile creatures. Erin Thompson wades into the debate surrounding Confederate monuments. Other content includes work from Deb Lucke, Lenore Myka, and SeongEun Macfarlane; essays by James McWilliams and Raj Telhan; and poetry by Anders Carlson-Wee, Didi Jackson, Sally Wen Mao, Michael Martella, and Jason Schneiderman.

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Summer 2021

Volume 97, Number 2

Our Summer issue deconstructs notions of leisure and freedom. In our cover story, Erika Meitner and Anna Maria Barry-Jester ruminate on Miami’s changing landscape as sea levels rise. Elias Rodriques observes a mother’s complicated repatriation to Jamaica; Rachel Greenwald Smith confronts privilege in lockdown; and Terrance Hayes imagines a Jasper Johns exhibit within a radically transformed White House art space. Other features include a portfolio of Elise Engler’s daily illustrations of the news; fiction by Claire Boyles, Nina MacLaughlin, and Erin Kate Ryan; and poetry by Ama Codjoe, Airea D. Matthews, Christopher Soto, and Tomás Q. Morín.

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Spring 2021

Volume 97, Number 1

This issue marks the first anniversary of the coronavirus through features that share themes of separation and dissonance—both physical and ideological, personal and public. Features include Dina Litovsky’s photo essay on the atmosphere of Manhattan’s first lockdown last spring; May Jeong’s report on the repatriation of Afghan migrants to a home country they barely know; Ryan Bradley on the worlds we find underground, which few of us even know about; T Kira Madden’s short story on the splitting of a self in grief; and Rachel Vorona Cote on the strange anachronisms that make recent period dramas so unique.

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Winter 2020

Volume 96, Number 4

The essays in our Winter issue showcase writers displaying a fundamental talent—that of deep, lucid inquiry into widely shared experiences. Julia Cooke offers a kind of close reading of the birth narrative—its power and its politics; Pamela Erens mines fresh critical insight from the novels of literary phenomenon Elena Ferrante; Simon Han, meanwhile, tests a new metaphor—that of sleepwalking—for the experience of living through 2020; and in the final installment of his borderlands trilogy, Francisco Cantú explores the origins and cultural power of Tejano-music titan Selena. Other features include a story, reported in collaboration with the Food and Environment Reporting Network (FERN), on the growing popularity of homesteading in the age of the pandemic; photographer Brian Palmer’s sublimely rendered visual documentary of forgotten African American burial grounds; and fiction and poetry that forgo convention for more adventurous constructions of interior life. (Cover Art: Hudson Christie)

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Fall 2020

Citizenship in the 21st Century

Volume 96, Number 3

This far into a century of upheavals, what does it mean to practice citizenship? How have our expectations—of our neighbors, of our institutions, of ourselves—evolved to respond to the influences of the age we live in? Can the ideals of citizenship transcend national interests? The Fall issue on citizenship in our century is neither prescriptive nor comprehensive, but exploratory, holding up the concept of citizenship to see the truths refracted through it. Through reporting, fiction, poetry, photography, and even fable, we ask questions that are vital to understanding the ways in which citizenship reaches through daily lived experience.

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Summer 2020

Summer Fiction

Volume 96, Number 2

This issue, the second of our summer-fiction biennial collection, landing in a year of surreal global emergency and sustained anxiety, celebrates the power of fiction to fortify our human connections from afar, and to expand our sense of self. It also features a vital selection of poetry, essays, criticism, and comics, as well as reporting on how a small but mighty magazine works to protect India’s threatened free press.

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Spring 2020

Volume 96, Number 1

The cover story for our spring issue explores the phenomenon of vicarious trauma among immigrant advocates. The issue also features essays that look at the intersection of disability and desire, the imitation of natural architecture, and the resonance and dissonance between imagined and real landscapes. Other features include fiction by Kevin Wilson and Kelli Jo Ford; poetry by Joy Priest and Kevin Young; and art by Stu Sherman and Beverly Acha.

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