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
Fuckery
A year or two ago
I drove my car
to one of the half-dozen
places I go and a spider
The Rapture is Happening Slowly, One at a Time, to Everyone
In an advertisement for a sex pill, the various couples enjoying pre-sex activities / (riding in a hot-air balloon, bowling, clinking their glasses of wine) may be—are they?—
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.
Rewriting the Script of Matrescence Memoir: A Conversation with Erica Stern
I felt like my son’s birth destroyed the narrative I’d heard about giving birth and becoming a mother, and I had to recreate a story for myself. So I wanted the form to reflect that muddling . . .
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 . . .
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.