Reviews

Malak Mattar, My Mother (detail), 2021, oil on canvas
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Ledia Xhoga’s Misinterpretation: A Guide to the Intimacy of Language and Translation
Ledia Xhoga’s debut novel, Misinterpretation, follows an unnamed Albanian woman adrift in present-day New York City, a translator and interpreter plagued by an unshakable feeling of alienation.
Do Not Despair: On Marie Howe’s New and Selected Poems
We were sitting around the kitchen table in the Birkerts-Focht apartment on Magnolia Street in Cambridge, discussing the work of our contemporaries. Someone quoted Yeats: “I don’t know which of us will succeed, but one thing I know for certain: there are too many of us.” It was the eighties...
Removing the Me from the We of Them: A Letter to Fady Joudah
Dear Fady, […] haunts me. It has haunted me since I first read it, bending over my desk near midnight, bathed in the amber glow of my lamp, and beside me, a cold, forgotten cup of cinnamon tea.
Waiting For a Ghost: On Juan Cárdenas’s The Devil of the Provinces
Early in Juan Cárdenas’s novel The Devil of the Provinces, a student asks the book’s protagonist, known only as “the biologist,” if God endows every living being with its own special purpose.
In Discussion: AGNI 96 Reviews AGNI 96
This edition of the folio contains three essays that have helped me process this dark moment. George Estreich says in his review of Jessie Van Eerden’s essay: “The best writing crosses a gap”—whether one of distance across a political border or one between two people at a restaurant. Of the gap on my mind of late—that between the alive world and the no-longer—Monika Cassel writes of poems by Hannah Baker Saltmarsh and Mark Irwin: “Like our hands, these poems’ nets grip briefly, then let go.”—Rachel Mennies, AGNI Reviews Editor
Submit Reviews to AGNI
Under the stewardship of Reviews Editor Rachel Mennies, we’re looking for roughly 1,500-to-3,000-word review essays that lift us to your singular inquiry-driven vantage: show us what your chosen book reveals to you that only you can show. Begin new conversations; bring us along for your investigations...