Editor William Pierce opens AGNI 102 with his thoughts on “Mattering,” starting with this thought: “There is a rift, in our troubled century, between imaginative writing and the various mainstream U.S. cultures. I get the sense from conversations, articles, and shifts in educational curricula that a growing contingent fears literature (why else would they work to restrict access?) and an even larger group dismisses it as irrelevant. Those reactions are nearly opposite, but together, they have me thinking about how literature matters. Can fiction, poetry, and essays be a meaningful force for truth? And how — considering that word imaginative — do they stand apart from the various modes of distraction and deception?”
AGNI 102 explores this through works related to crisis and talismans, with the threaded objects of Lia Purpura fronting an issue intent on noticing, holding, and putting forward. Siew Hii, Carl Phillips, and Denise Duhamel (in poetry) and Donald Quist and Rilla Askew (in nonfiction) confront the wiliness of false narrative. Stories by Scholastique Mukasonga (translated by Mark Polizzotti) and Niamh Mac Cabe, with poems by Megan Fernandes and Fereshteh Sari, trace the veins of complicity. And stories by Subhravanu Das and Reyumeh Ejue, with poems by Brenda Hillman, Kimberly Quiogue Andrews, and Peter Balakian, discover honest, tenuous shelter.
