Gravity and grace in counterpoise. In the essays, poems, and stories that inhabit AGNI 101, the inescapable world finds its match in soaring gestures of imagination.

The Magistrar

Fiction by Alp Türkol

Adapting Saw-Like Feather Fronds

Poetry by Hoa Nguyen

The Everlasting Universe of Things

there in the torpor

Poetry by Louis-Philippe Dalembert Translated from the French by Aidan Rooney
Portfolio

Afterlives: An AGNI Portfolio of Asian Adoptee Diaspora Writing

An efflorescence from 2023. “Nimble, protean, an adoptee has an awareness and creativity that converse with constellations, dimensions, manifold possibilities unbound by known origins and sources.”

What has changed? How can we tell the difference? Simple: turn out the lights, put the iPhone aside, step far into the night, and look up: how strange it feels, the ancient Other!

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Ledia Xhoga’s Misinterpretation: A Guide to the Intimacy of Language and Translation

Review by Suzana Vuljevic

Ledia Xhoga’s debut novel, Misinterpretation, follows an unnamed Albanian woman adrift in present-day New York City, a translator and interpreter plagued by an unshakable feeling of alienation.

Topographies of the Silk Roads

Blog post by M. Cynthia Cheung

I read Seamus Heaney’s North as a university student in 1997. At the time, there had been a number of failed ceasefires between the republican and loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, and the Good Friday agreement was not yet in sight. In North, Heaney finds a way through sectarian violence in a stunning series of poems centered on Northern Europe’s bog bodies...

Love the Animals

Poetry by Khadijah Queen

At his Basilica, the ivory horn
St. Francis used to call people to prayer
rather than dogs to hunt small creatures
hangs in a glass box, gift of a Muslim sultan,
a wooden cylinder later strung with chains
& used to beat disciples to attention.

On Translation, Bilingualism, and Squid Game

Blog post by Slava Faybysh

I was almost two, and it was altogether a more innocent time, when my family immigrated from Kyiv to Chicago. Reagan was the president-elect, and Disco Demolition Night in Comiskey Park only a few months in the rearview. In those days, my babblings came out in Russian, but, within a few short years...

Do Not Despair: On Marie Howe’s New and Selected Poems

Review by Askold Melnyczuk

We were sitting around the kitchen table in the Birkerts-Focht apartment on Magnolia Street in Cambridge, discussing the work of our contemporaries. Someone quoted Yeats: “I don’t know which of us will succeed, but one thing I know for certain: there are too many of us.” It was the eighties...

A Home for Vagrant Animals

Essay by Tessa Fontaine
There are bats in the attic. From my office, where I spend most of my waking hours, I can hear them. They live just above my head. Chittering. A screech, a crinkle. I know the babies are up there, just above the far eastern corner of the ceiling, hairless and pink. And then one appeared dead on the...
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