#vqr

Virginia Quarterly Review cover by Matt Dorfman https://www.metalmother.com/#/virginia-quarterly-review-winter-2223/

We lost the poet Jane Mead this week. This is from “Concerning That Prayer I Cannot Make,” published in Virginia Quarterly Review

You can read “Backcountry” at Virginia Quarterly Review.

Taken together, these essays reveal the hidden price of the paperless revolution. Every MacBook and iPad, every Kindle and Droid contains the labor of hundreds of invisible workers, uncounted lives foreshortened by poisoned water and air, and a landscape permanently scarred by our voracious scavenging. No matter how sleek and earth-friendly these devices may appear, they rise from the dirt and are mined with sweat and with blood. This is not to say that our information age is inherently bad. The protests after last year’s elections in Iran were largely organized over Twitter and documented via YouTube. Across Africa, farmers are using smartphones to access daily market prices via the Internet, assuring fairer compensation for their crops. This summer our government used Facebook to enlist and organize volunteers for the cleanup of the Gulf oil spill. But in our rush to embrace the new—the smaller, the faster, the more powerful—we must not confuse revolutionary products with revolutions in production. We must not forget that even in this age of enlightenment, much of the world remains stooped in black tunnels, tracing veins deeper into darkness.

Short story in the VQR summer issue. Enjoy! :)

Traci Brimhall, “Dear Eros,” published in Virginia Quarterly Review