Art by Jin Suk
Editor’s Note
In editing this special poetry supplement, I wanted to break down some of the insularity that exists between East Coast readers and West Coast writers. This explains my editorial bias toward poets who live or have lived on the West Coast. More importantly, I wanted to put together an issue of contemporary poems which would measure up to the following rule of thumb for what, in one of his essays, T. S. Eliot calls “genuine poetry”: “Has this poet something to say, a little different from what anyone has said before, and has he found, not only a different way of saying it, but the different way of saying it which expresses the difference in what he is saying?” I hope Agni’s readers will agree with me that these poems merit such scrutiny, and will find in this supplement work that deserves to be called “genuine.” My thanks to the contributors whose work—wayward, spirited, musically and emotionally vital—seems to me a benchmark for contemporary poetry.
Cambridge, 1989
Tom Sleigh’s books include House of Fact, House of Ruin (Graywolf, 2018); Station Zed (Graywolf, 2015); Army Cats (Graywolf, 2011), which won the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and Space Walk (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award. His most recent book of essays, The Land between Two Rivsers: Writing in an Age of Refugees (Graywolf, 2018), recounts his time as a journalist in the Middle East and Africa. He has received the Shelley Prize from the Poetry Society of America, and grants from the Lila Wallace Fund, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy in Berlin, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches in the MFA Program at Hunter College and is a contributing editor of AGNI. For more, visit www.tomsleigh.com. (updated 3/2020)
Sleigh’s AGNI poem “After Herodotus” won a Pushcart Prize and was reprinted in the 2006 anthology. “At the Pool” was chosen for The Best American Poetry 2009.
“An Interview with Tom Sleigh” by Allegra Wong also appears at AGNI Online. Sleigh’s second book, Waking, was reviewed in AGNI 34 by Joseph Lease. His collection The Chain was reviewed in AGNI 43 by Susan Mitchell. His collection The Dreamhouse was reviewed in AGNI 52 by Sven Birkerts.