AGNI 66

Vernaculars, inward and international. Heeding the issue number, we think of Route 66, the legendary American highway, cutting through Ben Miller’s uniquely essayistic Midwest, Jill McCorkle’s and Tara Goedjen’s fictional South, and painter Benny Andrews’s anguished and ecstatic historical South, before jumping off the atlas to take in Peter Balakian’s epical 9/11 sequences, Melissa Green’s topographies of the heart, and William T. Vollmann’s mytho-erotic fantasia. Vernaculars go international and rise into song, with Harrison Solow’s portrait of Welsh tenor Timothy Evans in “Bendithion” (the first-ever AGNI CD is included). Poetry by Steve Gehrke, Jordan Smith, Erica Funkhouser, and others. Essays by Scott Diel, Stephen O’Connor, Alta Ifland, and Askold Melnyczuk. And more.