They call me skinhead, and I got my own beauty. It is knife-scrawled across my back in sore, jagged letters, it’s in the way my eyes snap away from the obvious. ~from "Skinhead" by Patricia Smith AGNI 36

I could have written poetically of the islands since they draw our destiny with their constellations on the ocean; I could have spoken from the heart of this resonance, the sound of water on the senses . . . ~from "Poetics of Islands" by Ananda Devi (trans. from the French by Kazim Ali) AGNI 94

I have returned to the United States from a study abroad trip in Spain where once again I read The Odyssey with my students. I often have students in my classes who are fraternity or sorority members. ~from "Reading the Epics in the Trump Era" Reverb by John Poch

Among the things I like about Thoreau is that he was born in 1817 and died in 1862 at the same age my father did, one hundred years later. So Thoreau’s lifespan is familiar to me. ~from "A Walk on Cape Cod" by Eileen Myles AGNI 96

When I thirsted for blood, I killed a thing, a rabbit, say, a squirrel seized sleeping in its nest, a green snake, a rat fat from the leavings in the fields. ~from "The Wild Child" by Rikki Ducornet AGNI 62

He wakes, reads some Frost, and soon is ready To leave. “See you tomorrow.” A long line Of feeling follows him out the door. ~from "With a Friend at Bennington" by Robert Bly AGNI 44

🔥 NEW at AGNI Online 🔥 I’m writing this because of a translator’s note that’s got me worked up, a paratext that appears in the Korean edition of Torrey Peters’s novel "Detransition, Baby." ~from "Honoring the Opaque: Strategies for (Not) Translating Queerness" by Hoyoung Moon

I read Cyrillic and I fracture French; can find facilities in Germany and Greece; know just enough of folkway and odd song to make a wedding bearable, an amble worth the time. ~from "Halting Speech" by John Ditsky AGNI 5/6

🔥 NEW Reverb 🔥 I recently reread one of my published translations. A mistake. This is not something I normally do, and for good reason: just as no piece of writing is ever truly finished, it holds even truer that no translation is ever truly complete. ~from "Posthumous Regrets" by Mark Polizzotti

🔥NEW at AGNI Online🔥 In late summer 2005, I disembarked in the city of Mostar after a three- or four-hour bus ride from Dubrovnik, the vaunted pearl of the Adriatic in neighboring Croatia. ~from "Angel with a Flower on Her Chest" by Seán Carlson

🔥NEW at AGNI Online🔥 If war is a film it’s not necessarily horror. In my case it’s a road movie (what’s your favorite road movie?) ~from "If war" by Maksym Kryvtsov (Trans. from the Ukrainian by Larissa Babij)

🔥NEW at AGNI Online🔥 Begging to differ, we have not An ounce of poetry, no libraries, no bindings, No sooth-singers, no melting iambs. ~from "Pleistoscene" by Laura Sheahen

🔥NEW at AGNI Online🔥 I left without saying goodbye to him, my escape quicker and quieter than I’d imagined. And now, as I walk down my street, everything has taken on a peculiar quality . . . ~from "Wedding" by Ahmed Awny (trans. from the Arabic by Wiam El-Tamami)