Nkechi Ebubedike, Cloud Collage VI (detail), featured in AGNI 104
In Other Words: What Odysseus Says
A war in reverse: SLOW MOTION. First the victors lose their spoils. Blood flows. Back to the dead. They stand up. And kill. Rapists castrated, killed with the rocks that brought down the city. Who killed dies, who made himself a name there becomes No One. The butchers are hacked to bits. The killers killed. No one survives it only No One can survive it. Ten years mirrored in the inverse film: a war undone. BACKLASH. OPERATION UNDO. To be survived only by he who knows that what’s happening to him he has done, will do again. Survived by he who doesn’t believe he will escape. Survived by he who remembers the fleeting weightlessness at the apex of the ballistic curve before the plunge into the target before the fall, the decision to destroy the decision destroyed. He who decided, who felled: yes. Throw the child from the tower let it fall. Ten years ago it was my son in ten years he will be as old as I was when he was cast between me and suitors of Helen. I wasn’t crazy back then.
It spins. It all spins around. The child the lightness of the little body in which the carnage changes course. In years of waiting long waiting floods & great force of impact. See that what comes was only just reversed the sea that flees from shore that wave by wave goes back into itself that one is reminded even if one wants to remember nothing: MNEMESIS step by step back toward the beginning zero null irrefutable as gravity as exhaustion the simple nod of YES. He is felled by the decision to kill the child before it can block his way out of the war & the men of consequence before they pledge themselves to this war and the war to come. To salt the grounds for war and build upon ground zero: where people pretend to know nothing of the sea and remain grounded in grievance. Proceedings reversed make plaintiffs of defendants but of judges no convicts. SO SLOW E MOTION thermodynamics: my child my son what can I teach him that self-determined killing murder my legacy the freedom to bring the fall of if
Barbara Köhler
Barbara Köhler (1959–2021) was a German poet who authored a dozen books. Regarded as one of the most important voices of German poetry of the past half century, she received numerous accolades for her work, including the Peter Huchel Prize, the Clemens von Brentano Prize, and the Alice Salomon Poetry Prize. She was also an acclaimed translator, bringing into German works by Gertrude Stein and Samuel Beckett, for which she received the Erlangen Literature Prize for Poetry in Translation.
Christopher Nelson
Christopher Nelson is the author of the poetry collections Snowlight (JackLeg Press, 2027) and Blood Aria (University of Wisconsin Press, 2021) and six chapbooks, including Blue House, for which he received a New American Poets Fellowship from the Poetry Society of America. Recipient of an Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship and a translation grant from the Goethe-Institut, he is founding editor of Green Linden Press, a nonprofit publisher dedicated to poetic excellence and reforestation. More at christophernelson.info. (updated 10/2026)
Monika Cassel
Monika Cassel’s translation of Portolan by Daniela Danz is forthcoming from Georgia Review Books in 2027; her cotranslation with Christopher Nelson of No One’s Woman by Barbara Köhler is forthcoming from Green Linden Press in 2028. Her poems and translations have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Bennington Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Georgia Review, Only Poems, and Poetry Daily. She lives in Portland, Oregon, and is assistant poetry editor of Four Way Review. (updated 10/2026)
Read Cassel’s entry in AGNI’s “In Discussion: AGNI 96 Reviews AGNI 96”
Read Ellen Wiese’s review of “You traveled to the end of the world” by Daniela Danz, translated from German by Cassel in the folio “AGNI 96 Reviews AGNI 96”