Art takes over. Paintings by Danielle Mckinney sets the tone for an issue that puts the thinking self among canvases and books.
The Launch of AGNI 103
The Cooperage
Fuckery
To Never Have Risked Our Lives: A Portfolio of Central American and Mexican Diaspora Writing
A twisted part of the American dream is the idea that here in the U.S. you can erase your past and “start over.” Through this portfolio we can do the opposite: reclaim the past, reawaken memories, and connect with a new generation of people who are moving across borders.
From AGNI 103
Annunciation, Part III
Gun Stories
The Head of Goliath
Poet-pig who knows me, in the blindness, in the bog
The truth of a tree is that it has no name or a hundred, none of which come close to seizing that towering verticality, that leafy expanse, that slow and then sudden shift from verdant to russet as the days narrow and the year dissolves into the past. By its rebuff of nomenclaturism, the existence of multiple languages—the existence of translation—becomes not a problem but a solution, ridding us of our wrong notions.
Featured
A Minibus of Volunteers
The mood: Titanic tickets burn against your chest,
and still you cannot help but sail.
Soon this land is going to sink as well.
The question is—who’s first?
On the Train
“There Are Eyes Everywhere”: A Review of Oracle Smoke Machine
When I lived abroad at the end of my twenties, I luxuriated in feeling unseen. Across the ocean from the city I’d left, I could be anonymous. It thrilled me that no one in this new place knew . . .
Talking Trash
If I was writing about trash, I needed to investigate its history. The Covanta incinerator in Newark burns five miles from my house. Beside my office in Queens is the landfill buried under Flushing Meadows Park. I learned that the U.S. is the world’s largest producer of garbage...
The Purple House
Five hundred in cash and a pouch of rum was what we were each paid upon returning the flags. Yet another rally of the big leader behind us and yet another fruitful day of cheering done. . .
On Translation, Bilingualism, and Squid Game
I was almost two, and it was altogether a more innocent time, when my family immigrated from Kyiv to Chicago. Reagan was the president-elect, and Disco Demolition Night in Comiskey Park only a few months in the rearview. In those days, my babblings came out in Russian...