books 2008: Agni 67

[supercheesegirl]

Thanks to Heather for sending me this. Really great work in this issue, and I even liked the art, which is kind of rare for me with journals. Also, I found the nonfiction to be pretty uniformly terrific, although I skipped the essay about Rimbaud. (I did read the pieces about Proust and Kafka's The Trial, which are both with Rimbaud in the "books I've never read" category, but the essays were about the author's interaction with the work, not just a commentary on the work, so that made it interesting. And now I feel a little glad never to have read Proust.)

I liked Sarah Gorham's mushroom essay, and Roland Merullo's "Visions of Gerard", because it was so thoughtful and well observed. I thought Josh Gidding's Proust essay was interesting, and the whole concept of his book is really interesting and fresh, but it didn't really make me want to buy the book. I liked Jhumpa Lahiri's piece about Alberto de Lacerda--even though I had never heard of Lacerda before, I felt Lahiri's connection to and admiration for him. I quite liked the artist Pilar Coover's essay about her work.

The fiction I didn't really get all up about, but I remember it being quite good, with some haunting moments.

In the poetry, my favorites were the ones at the end, by Matt Donovan and Bruce Bond. Bond's poem, "The Last Days of Jaco Pastorius", was the final one in the issue, and had a really, really amazing ending. Honorable mentions to Scott Withiam's "Close", Stephen Burt's "In Maryland", and Joanne Diaz's "A la Turka", which I felt prepared to hate immediately because of the landscape orientation but which won me over.

I plan to send an essay to Agni as soon as submissions reopen. This is one of those journals that it'd be an honor to see my work in.

Comments

[birdmaddgirl.livejournal.com]

thanks for not mentioning any typos you may have seen ;)

[supercheesegirl.livejournal.com]

I didn't see any!