Crossing thresholds. Nearly two years in the making, “Futures: An AGNI Portfolio of Work in Translation” is the largest folio in our five decades of publication, showcasing 35 translators and 37 writers of prose and poetry, from 21 languages. From homelands as far-flung as Martinique, Malta, and Thailand, from eras spanning a century and a half, these voices demand a reconsideration of the past as we collectively contemplate our future. The issue also features poetry by Ishion Hutchinson, Daniel Borzutzky, and Amy Beeder; fiction by Barbara Sutton and Che Yuen; essays by Isaac Yuen and Melissa Chadburn—and a call to conscience by Sámi visual artist Máret Ánne Sara.

Sorties and Soundings. The opulent colors and imperiled undertones of cover and portfolio artist Salman Toor set the tone for AGNI 97. Stories by Garielle Lutz, Via Bleidner, and Anna Badkhen put the seismograph to relationships and track the needle as it jumps. Essayist Kai Maristed assesses the loss and legacy of her enigmatic father, while Ishion Hutchinson shows how the close reading of a poem can open into a close reading of the complexities of history. Poems by Kwame Dawes, Nicole W. Lee, Danez Smith, and Tyler Mills construct tales, mythographies, and fabulisms, that gesture toward another world: one that can and must be made from ours. All this and much more.

Place and displacement. Essayists Eileen Myles and Jessie van Eerden give visions of terra firma, exploring the space between fixity and mutability, while Teju Cole’s flash stories sketch liminal scenarios that locate the ways mystery attends us. Fiction by Emmelie Prophète (in Aidan Rooney’s translation) and an essay by Sofia Oumhani Benbahmed use settings of conflict and crisis to support a vexing search for identity; poets Michael Torres, Preeti Kaur Rajpal, and Diane Seuss return to moments that promise yet challenge belonging. Then founding editor Askold Melnyczuk and coeditor Sven Birkerts look back on 50 years of AGNI—from conception to full maturity. For a unique and celebratory art feature, we invited inspirations from a roster of former portfolio artists. Their theme: agni, which is to say, fire. The principle of combustion. (Cover art: Anne Neely)

Conflicts and reckonings. Flags held and changed and changed again, in Ukrainian poet Yuliya Musakovska’s “Such Love” (translated with Olena Jennings) and Robert Pinsky’s “Place Names.” Journeys at the edge of competing intentions, in stories by Koye Oyedeji and Mariana Villas-Boas. Prose from the multiplicities of self by Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, Kelle Groom, and Khairaini Barokka. And poems that reexamine the surface, by Victoria Chang, Kimiko Hahn, Charlie Clark, and D. Nurkse. Artist Andrea Chung tears through the cover.

Unforeseen urgencies, heightened introspections. The long Covid siege has put pressure on everything, not least the expressive arts. AGNI 93, with its unsettling cover and art portfolio by Deepa Jayaraman, channels the mood of the times. The issue includes poetry by Rafael Campo, Hope Wabuke, and others; fiction by Sara Majka, Jamie Figueroa, and Anzhelina Polonskaya (translated by Andrew Wachtel); and an utterly sui generis essay by Gregory Paul Caicco. Variety and intensity are the hallmark—we celebrate the wresting of meaning from loss and distress.

Traces found and brought to light. Disquieting images by cover and portfolio artist Sandra Brewster catch the mood of our times -- a mood echoed throughout the issue in work by our most attuned and expressive writers. Stories by Uzma Aslam Khan and Kirstin Allio lay bare the subjective costs of separation, while Bailey Gaylin Moore and Donald Quist offer a unique and relevant dialogue-essay in “How to Speak to a Police Officer.” Other stories, essays, and hybrid pieces discover new urgencies in the perennial, while the energies of invention shine out from poems by Brittany Cavallaro, Benjamin Garcia, Cyrus Cassells, Shana McCallum, and many others. 

Extending the range. With #91 we welcome a roster of new editors. Collectively chosen work explores impending crises as well as acts of mitigating goodness; elegies marking losses sit side by side with expressions flashing pure surprise. Cover and portfolio artist Christopher Cozier captures the sly globalized vectors of use and misuse, tracing a long history forward to now. Poems by Sandra McPherson, Steven Sanchez, Emily Mohn-Slate, Colin Channer, and others offer the sensory grab of the immediate, as do stories by Shauna Mackay, David Crouse, and Aurko Maitra and essays by Debra Nystrom, Jiaming Tang, and Ann Hood.

Mirrors of experience, refractions of the heart. Imagine assembling a kaleidoscope with a trove of colored gems, then looking into the eyepiece. From the deeply vibrant color fields of artist Laurie Goddard’s cover and portfolio, to—among many riches—moving and finely worked essays by Rilla Askew, Clifford Thompson, and Jodie Vinson; strong torquing poems by Hope Wabuke, Noah Warren, and Kevin Prufer; and stories by Lavinia Liang, Crystal Wilkinson, and Stephen Dixon, AGNI 90 circles through a vast emotional spectrum and leaves you feeling the world has been mysteriously rearranged.

Volatile urgencies. Ethiopian cover artist Wosene Worke Kosrof brings an ancient alphabet into our jostling, electric present, infusing AGNI 89 with a directed energy. Jo Ann Beard’s lead-off essay simultaneously inspects and enacts the writing process as she thinks back on the stories her father told about war and loss. Poet Sharon Olds grapples with a mother’s legacy, and sings an aria to the unchanging glide at her own body’s core. Jonathan Escoffery writes about a cash-strapped high school teacher who humiliates himself for pay. And Sam Kahn watches the iPhone replace the cigarette. Eamon Grennan, Grace Singh Smith, Hebe Uhart, Cyrus Cassells, Shauna Barbosa, and many more.

Not going gentle. An exuberance of colors by cover and portfolio artist Anne Neely introduces a market square of comedy and contemplation, unexpected narrative pathways, and an insistent push into unfamiliar locales, literal and figurative. The issue features poems by Ira Sadoff, D. Nurkse, Jane Wong, and two dozen others; inventive fiction of every stripe, including work by Valerie Sayers, Bipin Aurora, and John Biguenet; as well as essays and hybrid prose by Xujun Eberlein, Donald Morrill, Bonnie Friedman, and more.

What we leave behind us, and how we face the new. Art and cover by Paul Katz vividly embody the impulse to recast materials and signs. Stories by Stephen Dixon, Victoria Lancelotta, and Shahriar Mandanipour look at how we preserve and renew, while reflective essays by Emilia Phillips, Laura Gill, and Michael Stein resonate with poems of loss and remembrance by Gail Mazur, Cate Lycurgus, Rick Bursky and many others.

The diverging scales of public and private. Standing back and then homing in, architect and former graffiti artist Mensur Demir builds a space for poems by David Wojahn, Peter Balakian, Sophie Klahr, Natalie Shapero, and many others. Ruminations on shoplifting, Spoleto, and the cultural nuances of eating (by Donald Quist, Chad Davidson, and Jung Hae Chae) play against fraught interiors in the fiction of Julianna Baggott, Kent Nelson, and Perri Klass, to name just some.

The world as construed, re-construed, and mis-construed. The fantastical meldings of the real and conjectural in the work of artist Olalekan Jeyifous are a vivid visual emblem for the assembled contents of the issue. Our writers, too, run tests—trying variations of the past and reassessing what had been thought obvious. More than once the reader has to ask, Did that just happen? The issue includes stories by Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Evanthia Bromiley, and Marjorie Sandor; essays by Joel Agee, Megan Harlan, and Brandon Kreitler; and poems by Kaveh Akbar, Rosalie Moffett, Noah Warren, and Kathleen Winter. The search for viable new versions of our sensual—and consensual—reality proceeds.

Electric, eclectic—an art portfolio by Elaine Spatz-Rabinowitz frames up intimations of danger for an issue international across all three genres. Marilyn Hacker’s versions of Syria poet Golan Haji go side by side with new poems by Cynthia Zarin, John Kinsella, Dara Elerath, Chad Parmenter, and many others. In fiction, Jamie Quatro imagines lovers not taken, Tamas Dobozy proposes a hair-raising retrospective of a scandalous filmmaker’s career, and Elske Rahill gives us a woman whose urge to protect her daughter goes perilously far. Essays by Kim Adrian, Shahnaz Habib, Michael Sheehan, Radhiyah Ayobami, and others explore the legacies of trauma and the uncanny resourcefulness of the survival instinct.

Reading the coffee grounds. Lara Baladi’s striking emblems of private and public divination set the interrogating mood: the issue features, in an array of genuine riches, poems by Barbara Helfgott Hyett, David Daniel, Cyrus Cassells (later reprinted in The Best American Poetry), Hailey Leithauser, and also Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan in a kind of “poets’ dialogue” translated by Kai Maristed; essays by Tyler Mills, Marya Hornbacher, and William Eaton; and stories by Steve Stern, Noy Holland, Stephen Dixon, and Melissa Pritchard.

Artist Rosaire Appel’s arresting portfolio, which she calls “an abstract comic,” makes a provocatively apt counterweight to a gathering of work that is enticingly specific and serious. AGNI 82 is detail-rich, with memoir essays by Susan McCallum-Smith and Sheila Kohler; a Woolfian meditation on Woolf by Andrea Barrett; and diversely concrete fictions by Scott Nadelson, Colin Fleming, Malerie Willens and Ihab Hassan, to name a few. An especially full catalogue of poetry includes four translations, as well as work—some of it comic, yes—by Nin Andrews, Bob Hicok, Kathleen Graber, Joan Wickersham, and many others.

Anna Schuleit Haber's arresting sequence of paintings—from which we take our cover and portfolio—is entitled The Voice Imitator. How apt that is, for AGNI 81, even more than previous issues, is a gathering of uniquely expressive tonalities. From the fictional flights of writers like Stephen Dixon, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Amina Gautier, and Karl Ove Knausgaard; to the essayistic renderings of Chloe Honum, Jennifer S. Cheng, and Adam Szczucinski; and on to poems and translations by Cyrus Cassells, Patricia Hooper, Noah Warren, Martha Silano, and Vivek Narayanan, the octaves of the contemporary are thoroughly sounded.

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Issue 82

A “workshop of literature, where wonderful, audacious and strange things come into being.” —Bernhard Schlink, author of The Reader

AGNI is a literary magazine housed at Boston University and known “among readers around the world,” as the writers group PEN put it, “for publishing important new writers early in their careers, many of them translated into English for the first time.” 

E. C. Osondu won the  Caine Prize for African Writing; we had begun to champion his work years earlier—in fact, his first and second published stories appeared in AGNI. Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Interpreter of Maladies”  appeared in AGNI before becoming the title story of her Pulitzer-winning collection. Ha Jin was publishing his poems in AGNI when he was a graduate student at Brandeis University.  Some of his earliest stories appeared here also, and he has gone on to win the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, twice.  Others include Susanna Kaysen, Mark Doty, Glyn Maxwell, Joan Wickersham, Cynthia Huntington, and J. D. Daniels.

When they came to us, these names did not resonate the way they do now.  It was the writing that captured us—and does still.

Edited by writers Sven Birkerts and William Pierce, AGNI publishes two 240-page issues of fiction, essays, and poetry a year.  

The mission is straightforward: To bring our reader into the living moment, not as a tourist but as an engaged participant. And—as means and method—to champion writers who engage the world in and around them, shaping their words so intimately that the ripple of their seeing and the quirks of their thinking become part of the portrait.

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