AGNI 81
Contents
Editor's Note
The Problem of Other Minds
Fiction
Ivan at the Wedding
If Anyone Had Told Me Where We Were Going
By Elvis Bego
Haven’t a Clue
A Note on the Type
The Loss of All Lost Things
The Rain That Time/That Thing That Happened
Meeting God
Breaking Up
Who’s Crazy Now?
The Middle Child
Return of the Frenchman
A Simple Composition
By Shruti Swamy
Essays
Hikikomori: Salt Constellations
A Eulogy for the Living
By Jim Dameron
In a Foyer (a) and an Attic (b)
Tiles, Clouds, Boys, and Penicillin
Fainting
By Chloe Honum
A Frame Also Is Like Love
Shadowboxing: No, Really: What Is To Be Done in Ukraine
Bodies in Motion
By Mara Naselli
Crucibles: Is Knausgaard for Real?
Taormina, Traces
Poetry
There’s Not a Lot of Work for Sideways Man
By Sarah Barber
Vidalia
Ode to a South Window
The Pines of the Villa Pamphili
Frederico’s Querencia
Villanelle
By Peter Cooley
Baptist Town
Next Summer’s Garden
Winter Move
Natick
By Edgar Kunz
Window Washers
By Edgar Kunz
Attic Stairs
Self-Portrait at Twenty-Eight in Iberia
By Kyle McCord
Pentimento
By Kyle McCord
from Une Cave, Une Caverne, Un Trou . . .
The Wind Lends a Voice To a Mountain Laurel Above Pretty Polly’s Grave
Stopping at Texaco a Year After My Brother’s Death
The Heart in the Snow
By John Rybicki
The Invented Man
It was how a sentence
Ritalin
By Sara Wallace
Automatic Pool Cleaner
By Noah Warren
Helsingaar
By Noah Warren
Dead Star Warps Its Partner’s Light
The Future Is Your Friend
Poems of Summer
Hay Cutting
Bringing Home the Bull
Love Song of the Barred Owl
Anna Schuleit Haber’s arresting sequence of paintings—from which we take our cover and portfolio—is entitled The Voice Imitator. How apt that is, for AGNI 81, even more than previous issues, is a gathering of uniquely expressive tonalities. From the fictional flights of writers like Stephen Dixon, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Amina Gautier, and Karl Ove Knausgaard; to the essayistic renderings of Chloe Honum, Jennifer S. Cheng, and Adam Szczucinski; and on to poems and translations by Cyrus Cassells, Patricia Hooper, Noah Warren, Martha Silano, and Vivek Narayanan, the octaves of the contemporary are thoroughly sounded.