The Virginia Quarterly Review back issues from April 2007:
The Crossing
Apr 01, 2007; ... It's one of my earliest memories: riding my father's shoulders, as he waded across the Rio Grande. We were headed south toward Boquillas del Carmen, a tiny Mexican village that sits just across the border from Big Bend National Park. We did what all tourists went to do-to buy a few trinkets or ...
Líneas Fronterizas
Apr 01, 2007; ... Un peso cargado por dos No pesa más que la mitad. El mundo en un mapa parece el dibujo de una vaca En la carnicería, todas esas líneas mostrando Dónde cortar. Ese dibujo de la vaca es también un rompecabezas, Mostrando cómo caben muy bien ...
Life on the Line: The Arizona-Mexico Border
Apr 01, 2007; ... Eduardo saw Jesus coming with His holy light. It was winter, and for days, lost in a strange land, Eduardo had been wandering through mountains with nothing to eat and nothing to drink except what he could scoop from puddles of melted snow. He barely slept, trembling from a cold like none he'd ...
Border Town
Apr 01, 2007; ... Since the moment a foreign foot first touched American soil, there has been a constant inward flow of immigrants; each for their own reason but most to escape hardships and oppressions and to search for a better way of life. All have made their indelible imprint and unique contributions to the ...
Borders and Barriers
Apr 01, 2007; ... Two men in friendship are stronger than walls of stone. -ancient Mongolian saying What was I supposed to do? More than 30,000 people, the best and most capable of the country, left the GDR in July. It is quite easy to calculate the moment of breakdown of the East German economy ...
Mexico, America, and the Continental Divide
Apr 01, 2007; ... I'm sitting at the bar in a Depression-era saloon on a slightly seedy commercial strip in Pomona, California. The town is bathed in the harsh glare of an autumn sun, but in here it's dim and cool, the light muted by heavy curtains and brick walls and polished mahogany. You can hear the muffled ...
Walking Backward in the Dark
Apr 01, 2007; ... So, the jury says, once upon a time you fed the poor. You couldn't see the ground for the wreckage. If the women had dysentery behind their sheds the earth turned green and red and yellow and you couldn't tell what was food and what was shit and all your ...
Airport Economy Inn
Apr 01, 2007; ... No one speaking, nothing moving except for the way the snow keeps falling, its falling a kind of talking in the dark while all across the valley we keep on sleeping in the separate conditions of our dreaming. His face all overgrown with concern the ...
The Image as History
Apr 01, 2007; ... Clint Eastwood's Unmaking of an American Myth History is always the interpretation of the present. -George Herbert Mead In a speech delivered on August 30, 2005,the eve of the sixtieth anniversary of the American victory over Japan, President Bush declared, "In World War ...
Posthumous Mark Twain
Apr 01, 2007; ... When Samuel Clemens "went out" with Halley's Comet in 1910, as he had long predicted he would, he left behind a wealth of unpublished material composed under his famous pseudonym Mark Twain. Slowly, works trickled out that Clemens either hadn't dared to publish in his lifetime or couldn't find a ...
The Walt Whitman Controversy
Apr 01, 2007; ... A Lost Document The publication of significant previously unpublished work by one of America's best-known authors is always a major literary event, but when it is an unpublished piece by Mark Twain about another of America's legendary writers, Walt Whitman, it is cause for a double ...
"That Grotesque and Laughable Word"
Apr 01, 2007; ... Rethinking Patriotism in Time of War On April 14, 1887, Walt Whitman delivered a lecture he had given several times before, describing a moment that his audience knew well. Whitman reserved his talk, "Death of Abraham Lincoln," for the assassination's anniversary. This performance fell ...
Intercourse
Apr 01, 2007; ... John Wilkes Booth, 24, actor Catherine Winslow, 26, actress in his rooms at the National hotel, Washington DC, after the opening of his production of Richard III, which was attended by President and Mrs. Abraham Lincoln, April 11, 1863 John Wilkes you dare to ...
Wretch Like Me
Apr 01, 2007; ... In the hospitality of war we left them their dead to remember us by. -Archilochus The soldier kneeling in the wet gully has ceased his rocking and sobbing, though the claw-pronged limb reaching over him keeps trembling in the breeze, its shadow shaking, it's an oak branch, and ...
THE HOTEL MALOGO
Apr 01, 2007; ... The sun was setting when I got off the bus and entered the empty hotel bar. Most of the space in the dim rectangular room was taken up by iron chairs arranged round iron tables, the white paint peeling off to reveal the rust, brown and streaky, underneath. The wooden windows were closed and a ...
The Gross-Out Factor
Apr 01, 2007; ... In the garden that is the body, there is little as fertile as granulation tissue. It is a fleshy version of the richest topsoil, a vermilion carpeting that appears within a few days of injury and gives rise to new blood vessels and skin. Wounds that lack this cover never heal, but those that ...
Waiting for the Worst
Apr 01, 2007; ... Baluchistan, 2006 On a typically hot morning last October, about a dozen people squeezed into Majid Sohrabi's office, sitting on the black, pleather chairs pushed up against the walls. A ceiling fan whirled and wobbled overhead on its axis. Sohrabi, the thirtysomething nazim, or mayor, ...
The Accidental Plagiarist: Thoughts on the Anxiety of Influence, the Influence of Anxiety, and the Trouble with Originality
Apr 01, 2007; ... I. We Few, We Hapless Few Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory is too good. -Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human There comes a point in many a person's life when things that Nietzsche said begin to make good sense. This is not ...
Swell of You
Apr 01, 2007; ... You are about to read scads of poems, many dealing with stardom, a few with dead birds (not to mention the scoffers who off them), and one with a horrifying vision of the apocalypse. But before you begin, I want you to know, at this moment, while you gaze like a ...
The Light the Magician
Apr 01, 2007; ... The magician is sawing light in half, his sheer, importunate spell meshed in the bright cardiovascular net- body suspended in air before him. A writhe of pain or supple ecstasy shivers through it, a blind name he ...
The Mice of the Mother's House
Apr 01, 2007; ... The mice of the mother's house had tiny faces and breathed behind the paint, skittering like ticket stubs between floorboards, light and anxious. A few had small subway-car bodies tunneling fast, pushing roughshod over the grouting, nosing the dust of their ...
Carousel
Apr 01, 2007; ... The brutal white horses with painted-on faces Are riding their circles, riding Dead air. The dead air is hanging, Is ridden with riders and glued-on red Saddles. Crumpled hoofs in the dead-on air. The wild glare of the brutal white horses And the ...
Kitchen
Apr 01, 2007; ... I can see the grout between the bricks and hear the hot Wheel clatter as it fishtails, and then flips. The stove like some experiment: clouds of sweet steam belching each time my mother lifts the stock pot's sweaty lid. My sister's busy ...
6:12
Apr 01, 2007; ... My heart swelled inexplicably when I turned the key and caught the scent of something lovely, coming from the kitchen. I dropped my loaded bag and clowned a heart-attack when my son came running from his room and gripped my thumbs, and ...
Anthropocene
Apr 01, 2007; ... for Henri Michaux 1 She writes: the air here changes like a face in a mirror. In the flight of moths at dusk we see unknown primary colors. We have no word for that radiance. A starling with dusty eyes camps in the corona of the ...
THE SECOND SENSE
Apr 01, 2007; ... Five senses: hearing, sight, smell, touch, taste. -American Heritage Dictionary He has to make a living any way he can. He was a young D.Phil, from Budapest then-when they emigrated, for reasons nobody here is interested in, there have been so many waves of Europeans, ...
Barbarians at the Wall
Apr 01, 2007; ... Barbarians at the Wall The Great Wall: China Against the World, 1000 BC-AD 2000, by Julia Lovell. Grove, March 2006. $25 cloth, $15 paper The West Bank Wall: Unmaking Palestine, by Ray Dolphin. Pluto Press, March 2006. $22.95 paper Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten ...
George III: America's Last King
Apr 01, 2007; ... HISTORY George III: America's Last King, by Jeremy Black. Yale, December 2006. $35 Perhaps more famous for his loss of the American colonies and, later, his sanity than for any other aspect of his reign, King George III often elicits either knee-jerk scorn or pity. In evaluating the ...
Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550-1700
Apr 01, 2007; ... Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550-1700, by Jose Cañizares-Esguerra. Stanford, December 2006. $60 cloth, $24.95 paper At first glance, the histories of Protestant New England and Catholic New Spain do not appear to have much in common with each other. Not so, argues ...
Modern Republican: Arthur Larson and the Eisenhower Years
Apr 01, 2007; ... Modern Republican: Arthur Larson and the Eisenhower Years, by David L. Stebenne. Indiana, November 2006. $35 When presidential hopeful George W. Bush campaigned in 2000 on a platform of "compassionate conservatism," the term struck many political observers as an essentially novel effort ...
Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic
Apr 01, 2007; ... Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic, by Matthew Mason. North Carolina, October 2006. $45 The more traditional view holds that slavery became a polarizing issue in US political life as late as 1819, during the debates over the admission of Missouri to the Union, debates ...
Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln's Opponents in the North
Apr 01, 2007; ... Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln's Opponents in the North, by Jennifer L. Weber. Oxford, October 2006. $28 The definition of what constitutes legitimate dissent in wartime has proven a rather vexing issue for Americans throughout their nation's history, including the current ...
Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America
Apr 01, 2007; ... Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America, by Peniel E. Joseph. Holt, July 2006. $27.50 Joseph's ambitious new study is the most visible example of an explosion of literature on black power and black self-defense during the civil rights era ....
Between Legitimacy and Violence: A History of Colombia, 1875-2002
Apr 01, 2007; ... Between Legitimacy and Violence: A History of Colombia, 1875-2002, by Marco Palacios, translated by Richard Stoller. Duke, May 2006. $22.95 paper This recent addition to the Latin America in Translation series is a panoramic chronicle of Colombia's "long twentieth century," reaching back ...
Khrushchev's Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary
Apr 01, 2007; ... Khrushchev's Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary, by Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali. Norton, February 2006. $35 Just as many historians were dropping political historiography for social and cultural historiography, the opening of the Soviet-bloc archives-whose ...
Surprised in Translation
Apr 01, 2007; ... LITERARY STUDIES Surprised in Translation, by Mary Ann Caws. Chicago, September 2006. $25 Caws, Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, takes a moment to look back over her career as scholar and ...
The Essential Wayne Booth
Apr 01, 2007; ... The Essential Wayne Booth, edited by Walter Jost. Chicago, July 2006. $35 A leading literary critic of the twentieth century, Wayne C. Booth meticulously explored rhetoric and its control over our reading (and daily) experience. This collection of previously published essays (compiled by ...
Agamemnon's Daughter: A Novella and Stories
Apr 01, 2007; ... FICTION Agamemnon's Daughter: A Novella and Stories, by Ismail Kadare, translated by David Bellos. Arcade Publishing, November 2006. $14 Kadare, winner of the Man Booker Prize in 2005, here explores the astonishingly cruel and inhuman permutations of power. The title novella infuses a ...
Spit Baths: Stories
Apr 01, 2007; ... Spit Baths: Stories, by Greg Downs. Georgia, October 2006. $24.95 Downs's collection of short stories is about men beleaguered by an America still tarnished by racial and sexual prejudice even after the so-called successes of feminism and the civil rights movement. Personal and ...
Dark Horses: Poets on Overlooked Poems
Apr 01, 2007; ... POETRY Dark Horses: Poets on Overlooked Poems, edited by Joy Katz and Kevin Prufer. Illinois, December 2006. $19.95 paper The idea behind Dark Horses started as a conversation among five poets about "wonderful, obscure poems we'd come across over the years." After musing on the topic and ...
Incomplete Knowledge
Apr 01, 2007; ... Incomplete Knowledge, by Jeffrey Harrison. Four Way Books, October 2006. $14.95 paper "If it is true what Buber says, that no encounter / lacks a spiritual significance" (to borrow a pair of lines from Harrison's Pushcart Prize-winning "God's Penis"), then perhaps the project of any poet ...
Horse Latitudes
Apr 01, 2007; ... Horse Latitudes, by Paul Muldoon. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, October 2006. $22 Horse Latitudes, released concurrently with Muldoon's Oxford Lectures (The End of the Poem), is as smart as it is witty, as referential to popular culture as it is to the poetry of his forebears, and as ...
The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1975-2005
Apr 01, 2007; ... The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1975-2005. California, October 2006. $49.95 A lot of poets I know remember where they were when they first encountered Robert Creeley's poetry, in the way a jazz musician might remember the first time he heard a Charlie Parker record. First ...
Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems
Apr 01, 2007; ... Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems, by Robert Wrigley. Penguin, October 2006. $20 paper This collection begins with nineteen new poems that show the breadth of Wrigley's poetics. They do not shy away from such big topics as war, nature, love, 9/11, or religion; but they never ...
American Religious Poems: An Anthology
Apr 01, 2007; ... American Religious Poems: An Anthology, edited by Harold Bloom and Jesse Zuba. Library of America, October 2006. $40 Arranged chronologically, this anthology spans four centuries, beginning with the Bay Psalm Book of 1640 and extending through the early twenty-first century. It contains ...
Hart Crane: Complete Poems and Selected Letters
Apr 01, 2007; ... Hart Crane: Complete Poems and Selected Letters, edited by Langdon Hammer. Library of America, September 2006. $40 Despite Crane's tortured personal life, the intellectual optimism that drove his masterpieces, White Buildings and The Bridge (along with many of his finest individual ...
A Trick of Sunlight
Apr 01, 2007; ... A Trick of Sunlight, by Dick Davis. Swallow Press, June 2006. $14.95 paper Davis's poems exemplify Auden's definition of the art as "the clear expression of mixed feelings." With a sly, self-deprecating wit, a wisdom that spurns bombast, they are charming, as well as intelligent, so ...
Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time
Apr 01, 2007; ... GENERAL NONFICTION Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time, by Rob Sheffield. Crown, January 2007. $22.95 Before he became a successful music journalist, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, and a talking head on MTV and VH1, Rob Sheffield was a "shy, skinny, Irish ...
Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness
Apr 01, 2007; ... Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness, by Matt Wray. Duke, November 2006. $21.95 paper "America became white . . . because of the necessity of denying the Black presence, and justifying the Black subjugation. No community can be based on such a principle-or, in ...
The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability
Apr 01, 2007; ... The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability, by Laura Kipnis. Pantheon, October 2006. $23.95 Since Freud, we have been alert to the prominence of ambivalence in emotional life. In this slim follow-up to the highly successful Against Love: A Polemic (2003), Kipnis, a professor at ...
Crucible of the Civil War: Virginia from Secession to Commemoration
Apr 01, 2007; ... UVA FACULTY BOOKS Crucible of the Civil War: Virginia from Secession to Commemoration, edited by Edward L. Ayers, Gary W. Gallagher, and Andrew J. Torget. Virginia, September 2006. $35 This small collection of essays seeks to redress an odd omission. Editor Torget notes that despite ...
Scar Tissue: Poems
Apr 01, 2007; ... Scar Tissue: Poems, by Charles Wright. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, July 2006. $22 Readers of Charles Wright know that he was born, as he writes in "A Short History of My Life," with "the shadows of twilight in my heart." A self-proclaimed "God-fearing agnostic," Wright has for decades, ...
The Robert Bellah Reader
Apr 01, 2007; ... The Robert Bellah Reader, edited by Robert N. Bellah and Steven M. Tipton. Duke, October 2006. $27.95 paper Calling Robert Bellah a sociologist is like calling Louis Armstrong a trumpet player. The Bellah Reader demonstrates what a serious scholar can accomplish when he perceives a ...
Picasso and American Art
Apr 01, 2007; ... Picasso and American Art, by Michael FitzGerald. Yale, October 2006. $65 Of course we knew that Picasso had a profound impact on contemporary art, that two generations of painters have looked to him for inspiration, and that he is considered to be the central figure in the art of the ...
The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy
Apr 01, 2007; ... The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy, by Douglas Biow. Cornell, September 2006. $35 Italian Renaissance theorists tried to idealize everything, even as they lived in a world of sin, plague, and filth. No matter how elevated your dinner conversation, sooner or later you had to ...
Motorcycle: Evolution, Design, Passion
Apr 01, 2007; ... Motorcycle: Evolution, Design, Passion, by Mick Walker. Johns Hopkins, August 2006. $35 From Gottlieb Daimler's two-wheeled "bone-shaker" in 1885 to the latest high-performance, high-style machines, the motorcycle has claimed a unique place in the history and lore of open road. Walker's ...
Archie and Amélie: Love and Madness in the Gilded Age
Apr 01, 2007; ... Archie and Amélie: Love and Madness in the Gilded Age, by Donna M. Lucey. Crown, June 2006. $25.95 This captivating dual biography of John Armstrong Chanler and Amélie Rives should command respect in any age. Their love was mutual and tempestuous, if star-crossed; the madness (his) was ...