Welcome to issue 91, the first to present work chosen by our newly broadened masthead!
For this event we’ve gathered videos from around the world, filmed by our contributors, who, like the rest of us, are isolating in response to the novel coronavirus. This digital event was spurred by the pandemic, but celebrating in a distanced way has the advantage of bringing together many who, even in the best of times, would not be able to meet up in person. Nearly every contributor takes the stage here, and anyone with Internet access, and the freedom to point their browsers as they choose, can join the audience.
Our launch comprises several related posts. In one, the editors introduce themselves, and elsewhere we’ve grouped contributors’ readings by genre. But below, all of the titles in the new spring issue appear in sequence. Nearly every one of them tops a video, and all link to the story, poem, or essay from #91. We invite you to watch, listen, read, and be transported.
—The Editors
AGNI 91’s full roster of new writing is available online for the next three months. Please know that, as always, this issue lives first and best in print. Buying it is just one of the ways you can support our work. We are grateful for funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mass Cultural Council, and a roster of more than 100 engaged individual donors. We toast them, too, as we raise a glass to AGNI 91!
William Pierce’s introductory essay “The Peculiarities of Literary Meaning”
Martha Witt’s short story “Nuraghi”
Maurine Ogonnaya Ogbaa’s short story “Goodbye”
Benjamin S. Grossberg’s poem “In the Late Days of the Republic”
Katherine Fallon’s poem “Glacial”
Heather Sellers’s poem “Accidental Practitioners”
Anya Silvers’s poem “To the Poet”
Xujun Eberlein’s essay “The Summer before Thirteen”
Jiaming Tang’s essay “Where Flowers Bloom but Have No Scent”
Aurko Maitra’s short story “Decades”
Alice Pettway’s poems “The Dead of Winter” and “Sacrifice”
Will Cordeiro’s poem “Unregenerate Pastoral”
Cynthia Manick’s poem “There Are No Unsacred Spaces”
Gina Franco’s poem “We Want Everything of Value to Be Eternal”
Kate Li’s poem “As Relic, As Remnant”
Adeniyi Ademoroti’s short story “Desire”
David Crouse’s short story “The Black Bear Month”
Ivan Ruccione’s short story “Departures,” translated by Sara Russell
Shauna Mackay’s short story “The Bend”
Featured Artist Christopher Cozier’s essay “Dark Cycles/Circles”
Jaz Sufi’s poem “Every Part of the Animal”
Dawn Tripp’s poems “Looking for Arrowheads,” “The Gate,” and “Night in August”
Susan Jackson Rodgers’s short story “Lou”
Ann Hood’s essay “Stop Breath”
Christine Gosnay’s poem “I Can’t Remain Here”
Leslie Sainz’s poems “Mal de Ojo” and “Sonnet for Obatala”
Laura Villareal’s poem “Mother // Monster****”
Mairead Small Staid’s poems “Demeter, Midwinter” and “Watching the Eclipse with Weldon Kees”
Debra Nystrom’s essay “Dream of the Subjunctive”
Cathryn Klusmeier’s essay “Gutted”
Sasha West’s poem “The Long Emergency”
Glenn Shaheen’s poem “Generation Loss”
Alen Hamza’s poem “Action at a Distance”
Steven Sanchez’s poem “Ode to Syphilis”
Emily Mohn-Slate’s poem “People at Yellow Lights Scrolling”
Benjamin Gucciardi’s poems “Outside Tallahassee” and “The Invisible Hand Knocks Twice”
D. Nurkse’s poem “Our Defeat”
Jackie Craven’s poem “Under a Calder Mobile, August 1959”
Ciera Horton McElroy’s short story “Donny Q”
Mervyn Seivwright’s “Manhood’s Gambit” and “Chess Piece Patterns”
Jay Wickersham’s poem “My Great-Grandfather’s Chair”
Richard Tillinghast’s poem “Early Church”
Sandra McPherson’s poem “Class Art / Art Class: Sutter Psych Hospital****”
Colin Channer’s poems “The Fat Man Spoke of Fish” and “The Fixed Mutability of Things”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s poem “Wanderer’s Night Song (II),” translated by James Richardson
