In his own beauty he had discovered an endowment not to be overvalued or abused. What came to him as a result of his beauty would be accepted gratefully, but with no accompanying sense that he had done anything to deserve it. ~from "A Beauty" by Robert Boyers AGNI 74

He’d sail to the drop-off at the end of the world. He’d perch high on the mast and warble his head off, he would, every note breaking his heart again, but like a safety valve letting off steam. ~from "Archie Said Love Should Not Mean But Be" by Andrew H. Oerke AGNI Online

We converge in the auditorium. Circle on the scarred stage. It smells of paint and its slippery cousin turpentine, also, of forgotten oranges and pancake make-up. ~from "Drama Kids" by Katie Williams AGNI Online

Where is my brother? I am stunned, starving, staring into the mirror in the hopes of seeing a face other than mine gaze back. Where is my brother? ~from "My Brother" by Paisley Rekdal AGNI Online

wrote about this connection between ecocide and genocide, wrt expulsion, devastation, birds, and palestine, in my letters with emet ezell @agnimagazine.bsky.social agnionline.bu.edu/conversation...

A hurricane splits trees, opening a smell deep and dense as the earth’s consciousness cracked open. My brother kneels to wash and bandage the open sores on my father’s feet. ~from "The Gospel of Grief & Grace & Gratitude" by Melanie Rae Thon AGNI Online

We want to celebrate the fellow magazines that got us through the dirty snow piles of blizzards and endless cups of tea: @grantamag.bsky.social, @kenyonreview.bsky.social, @willowspringsmag.bsky.social, and @agnimagazine.bsky.social #printpubpals #literaryjournal #reading

They always failed to add the blood spot in the white of one eye, the sag of a breast, worry lines tugging at the bow mouth. ~from "Madonna" by Barbara Eve AGNI 5/6

The boy’s parents often told him that if he didn’t stop misbehaving they’d leave the house without him. And then one day they did. “We tried to tell you,” they said. They closed the front door and pulled out of the driveway. ~from "The Boy" by Anthony Varallo AGNI Online

Now I will consider my purple Plymouth Duster. For it was assembled in Michigan the month of my conception. For Plum Crazy is the name of its color. For that color survives only in the door jambs and inside the trunk. ~from "Jubilate" by William Notter AGNI Online

I laid telephone line, then cable when it came along. I pulled T-shirts off a silk-screen press. I cleaned offices in buildings thirty-five floors high. I filed the metal edges of grease fryers hot off a welding line. ~from "Work" by Michael Stigman AGNI Online

When tequila waves its fringed, serrated flag, the battle halts and armies return the order they intended to impose. Often two squires accompany it: salt and lime. ~from "Tequila" by Álvaro Mutis (translated from the Spanish by Forrest Gander AGNI 44

The first was a violinist, youngish and unshaved, who kept her husband in a carved box beside her toaster. She opened it once when I came collecting for the newspaper. Splinters of bone, mostly, a little ash. ~from "Widows I Have Known" by Lance Larsen AGNI 57

Like being told to try ringing handbells in a small cave to hear a different music or to learn to miss less an old one, there were just the two kinds of forgiveness back then ~from "The Fall of Rome" by Carl Phillips 🔥 AGNI 102 🔥

#awp2026 isn't over yet! 🔥 Don't miss assistant poetry editor @izineh.bsky.social on the panel Poetry at the Intersection of Science, Ethics & Care, today at 10:35am! buff.ly/RDub0G0

It you’re at #awp2026, be sure to visit us at bookfair table T350!

Happy Friday, #awp2026! Today, poetry editor @jezzbah.bsky.social will present on the panel Words from the Deep, Dark Woods: Using Fairy Tales as Foil & Fuse. 🔥 See you there at 9:00am!

We had a blast at tonight’s Boathouse Extravaganza! Pictured below: Readers Athena Nassar and @rika99.bsky.social with Poetry Editor @jezzbah.bsky.social and Senior Editor @saraswat-s.bsky.social 📸

🔥TONIGHT🔥 Join us for our AWP off-site reading, Boathouse Extravaganza: Writers (and Editors) on the Waterfront! We can't wait to hear from Lia Purpura, @rika99.bsky.social, @samuelkolawole.bsky.social, Athena Nassar, and others! #awp2026

Good morning, #awp2026! Be sure to catch assistant poetry editor @izineh.bsky.social on the panel Mizna Presents: HUNA—Writing Resistance in the Now. 🔥 Today at 10:35am! buff.ly/WjwEY2N

We're in Baltimore! Join us TOMORROW NIGHT at 7pm for our AWP off-site reading, Boathouse Extravaganza: Writers (and Editors) on the Waterfront! Lia Purpura, @rika99.bsky.social, @samuelkolawole.bsky.social, and Athena Nassar will be reading for AGNI. See you there! #awp2026

Wondering where to find AGNI at #awp2026? Swing by Bookfair Table T350 and find our editors at the following events👇

“Fear nothing—neither the pang of rejection nor the riskier high of success. We’ll always need great poems and novels to, as Flaubert said, do what nature does: set us dreaming.“ —Askold Melnycz, founding editor of @agnimagazine.bsky.social and @arrowsmithpress.bsky.social: at.pw.org/AERMelnyczuk

"Suddenly the windows trembled; smoke surged upward from every direction . . .One blast after another. War had come to us—a monster that fed on blood and left only wreckage in its wake." ~Read "A Cold Halo of Calm," the latest blog post by Purple Saxifrage, situated in Iran

Her care inventory: gloves, sanitizers, body powder, wipes, lotion, bedpan. Today I order a lavender spray. The carpet soaked in urine, her diaper hanging loose— swollen, sagged. ~from "My Mother Becomes a Pond" by Leila Farjami 🔥 AGNI 102 🔥

🔥ONE WEEK FROM TODAY🔥 Join us for our AWP off-site reading, Boathouse Extravaganza: Writers (and Editors) on the Waterfront! Lia Purpura, @rika99.bsky.social, @samuelkolawole.bsky.social, and Athena Nassar will be reading for AGNI. See you there! #awp2026

Congratulations to Bo Hee Moon, whose poem "Letters to Omma—Reunion," which was part of Afterlives: An AGNI Portfolio of Asian Adoptee Diaspora Writing, received the 2025 Brazos Bookstore / Academy of American Poets Prize! Read it here👇 buff.ly/HfGB7m7

🔥NEW at AGNI Online🔥 At eleven, I had no idea what I was holding in my hands. When I closed the dictionary, the world outside the book was as foreign to me as the world inside the book . . . ~from "Memory of Translation" by Maria B. Olujic

"Does It Fuck You Up?: Notes from an Occupation" by Kathryn Nuernberger is the latest addition to our Minneapolis 2026 scroll, “The Border Moves Through Us." Read it here 👇

The car boiled over on a perished piece of desert it was a black Saab beached in the stars I slept two peaceful hours on bitterbrush before following sag of power lines ~from "Great Basin" by Ian Harris AGNI Online

"Few poets are as plain as Cesare Pavese—and few as difficult to carry from Italian into English." ICYMI: read our latest review 🔥 "Pavese’s Hard Labor: On the Risks and Afterlives of Translation" by Yogesh Patel 🔥

🔥NEW at AGNI Online🔥 The tent is a punching bag for the wind. The field—a soggy billiard table, bulging, blotched with mold. ~from "A Minibus of Volunteers" by Dmitry Blizniuk (trans. from the Ukrainian by Sergey Gerasimov)

How quaint lovemaking was in the old movies, the lovers saving it for the end which was called The End, and all dressed up for it ~from "The End" by Wesley McNair AGNI Online

One of the ways that we transform through writing is not so much an about-face on a particular issue, but an experience of deepening or complexifying understanding. ~from "You Are Not the Choir—or, Seeing the Matrix" by Sarah Rose Nordgren AGNI Online

🔥NEW at AGNI Online🔥 "She always came to our house as the New Year approached. Alone—she never brought her daughters with her. She would hand my mother an envelope stuffed with cash." ~from "The Invisible Belt" by Purple Saxifrage

Just published 🔥 "What the Poet Taught Me," a blog post by Rachel Basch in memory of Baron Wormser (February 4, 1948–October 7, 2025). Read it at AGNI Online!👇

🔥NEW at AGNI Online🔥 "'The Border Moves Through Us': From Minneapolis, 2026," a scroll curated by Senior Poetry Editor @jkwondobbs.bsky.social. Read her introduction here👇 agnionline.bu.edu/blog/from-mi...

Boston peeps, join me at @agnimagazine.bsky.social's Bill Pierce at Papercuts Bookshop in JP Tuesday, February 10, for the paperback launch of What We Tried to Bury Grows Here (@twodollarradio.bsky.social).

Buildings I remembered from forty years ago were still locked onto corners like great rooks, orange and yellow hulks left over from a time when men wore white shirts and women wore polka-dot dresses. ~from "Bronx" by K. E. Duffin AGNI 61

Mounded snow faintly gray and sculpted into what seems the entire vocabulary of resignation. It shines in the one patch of sun, is lustered with the precipitate of the exhaust of turbine engines, the burnt carbons of Precambrian forests. ~from "Layover" by Robert Hass AGNI 40

The sea at Koh Samet is calm and clean at the cusp of winter, as the rainy season ends—it makes you want to sprawl on the sand, maybe dip your feet in the translucent, sun-filled water. ~from "Brittle" by Worapoj Panpong (translated from the Thai by Mui Poopoksakul) AGNI 94

Nietzsche. Rilke. Vilhelm Ekelund. If I had to come up with a single name for this triad, it might be The Exquisites: agnionline.bu.edu/conversation... #poetry #WritingCommmunity #booksky Via @agnimagazine.bsky.social

Spiritual tourists: the playboys of religions. agnionline.bu.edu/blog/spiritu... via @agnimagazine.bsky.social

Carl - reading another poem of yours in Agni journal yesterday felt like ‘falling into poetry’ as one would fall into the centre of a dahlia. And I can suddenly see why all my scores of seedling poems need warmth n water and encouraging to be less fragile - braver and more tender. Thank you.

Note the one long crease from brow to chin. Gaunt. Giacomettiish even, wouldn’t you say? Slivered cheeks sucked in as if some tart pill dandled on the tongue unseen. ~from "Self-Portrait as the Y-Axis" by Roy Mash AGNI Online

Chips of beach glass are not usually arranged discreetly but rather displayed in a jumble in decorative bowls or casually scattered in large, non-native clam shells. In bathrooms. In hallways. Mostly liminal spaces. ~from "Memo Re: Beach Glass" by Lia Purpura AGNI Online

She instructs me in her vacant way to identify the flower by looking inside the blossom— deep inside the blossom to spy its waxy alchemy, the sight of her pink skirt and pointed yellow feet flattened between two sheets ~from "Mother, Pressed" by Sarah Rose Nordgren AGNI 79

We were drunk at the beach club. High sun. We had been there hours. Picnic baskets. Thwack of flat sandals on the decking. The constant, constant shaking of martinis. Gimlets. Margaritas, even. ~from "High Sun" by Vanessa Cuti AGNI 92

A man is made of fifteen substances: bones, gristle, sinews, veins, arteries, strings, cords, skin, pannicles, hair, nails, grease, flesh, blood, and marrow within the bones ~from "Distortions on Boorde 2" by Charles Bardes, M.D. AGNI 79

ICYMI 👀 Our submission portal has re-opened! We look for writing that catches experience before the crusts of habit form—poetry and prose that resist ideas about what a certain kind of writing “should do.” Learn more👇 buff.ly/auE6ZFe