Art takes over. Paintings by Danielle Mckinney set the tone for an issue that puts the thinking self among canvases and books.
“The Border Moves Through Us”: From Minneapolis, 2026
The works gathered here constitute acts of witness from Minneapolis, 2026. They pull apart and lay bare the historical and embodied dimensions of carceral Trumpism by making sense of its full-scale assault on personhood and daily life. As Lau Malaver writes, “The border, then, is not outside us. It moves through us.”
From AGNI 103
Gun Stories
To Be in a Time of War
Annunciation, Part III
Of the verb whose brief outline is all I saw: / The stuff of dying and killing but with the sound of a smile. / It bleeds, devours, shatters, and so / I didn’t have time to reach the heart of the matter.
Featured
What the Poet Taught Me
In memory of Baron Wormser, February 4, 1948–October 7, 2025. The subject line of the email read “Bad news.” It was late September 2025, and Baron and I were scheduled to teach a weekend writing workshop together in early October. At first, I figured “bad news” meant a scheduling conflict . . .
Fuckery
A year or two ago
I drove my car
to one of the half-dozen
places I go and a spider
The Head of Goliath
And like Caravaggio, I am my own savior
rent by my own hand. Depicted:
A younger version of the painter heeds
The Crossing
What does the world look like? What is the world? And what is Gaza? I had been trapped in it for all thirty-one years of my life, and had not left once.
A Local Struggle: On Danielle Legros Georges’s Last Chapbook
The chapbook Acts of Resistance to New England Slavery by Africans Themselves in New England—by Danielle Legros Georges, former poet laureate of Boston . . . —is set in a time of revolution, harnessing from that era a spirit of lightness while speaking, as the title says, of Africans’ resistance.
The Refrigerated Thought: On Time and Writing
Say I am sitting with my mother and grandmother at the square kitchen table patterned over by vinyl-cloth apples, having just eaten lunch. Our elbows crowd the breadbasket, in which remains one solid slice and . . .