AGNI 67

Voice and transformation. This issue features a deep reckoning of friendship by Roland Merullo, a recollection of a mentor by Jhumpa Lahiri, and sharp, smart idiosyncracies by Sarah Gorham and David Rivard. Playing against these are antic and bittersweet stories by Perle Besserman, Ken Kalfus, and Vladimir Makanin, among others. Here are writers marking how the self broods—broods, and then flips loss onto its turtle back; how it damns the damnable and laughs out at all that is tangled and absurd. Pilar Coover’s hallucinatory visual textures aptly counterpoint the voices, which also include those of poets Matt Donovan, Amy Beeder, Paula Closson Buck, Bruce Smith, and Derek Walcott.