Columns

In 2019, in the Ciro Menotti Cemetery of Modena, Italy, a couple of 1,600-year-old skeletons were discovered.

VQR columnist Laura Kolbe’s series of essays considers American art through poet and physician Kolbe’s own personal and experiential lens.

Sister Angela is wearing the softest robe I have ever touched. Her hearing aids are out and her dentures crunch as they settle. She is beaming at me from the dark, her face soft from sleep, her small body laundry-scented.

Bodies Under Siege in American Art

The copper mine in Erdenet, Mongolia, provides jobs, income, opportunities. It finances most of the city’s infrastructure. It funds a hospital. People are grateful for the mine, and proud. There’s copper everywhere in Erdenet.

Take death for a walk in your minds, folks. Either you’ll die glad you did, or, keeling over suddenly, you won’t be out anything. 

One of our body’s chief concerns is with distinguishing between inside and outside, me from NOT-me.

A sheet of ground glass is useful for manual focusing in photography. With a ground-glass viewer inserted at the back of some large cameras, the image appears upside down, in vivid detail.