On the Periphery of a Dream

Not only does this latest issue of AGNI live up to its reputation for high caliber fiction and poetry, but the non-fiction -- five prose pieces along with an extended art focus replete with color plates and DVD -- impressed me with the level of depth, diversity, and intelligence.  Brian Christian's "That Trick of Memory: Seasonally Induced Amnesia in Seattle" is an intersection of memoir, philosophy, and science, spun together in a palliative rumination via tight, poetic narration.  Similarly, what I found moving in both Lia Purpura's "Two Experiments and a Coda" and Nadia Gregor's "The Dysthenic Revelation" was how their narrators, armed with intellect and language, attempt to articulate their characteristic ailments and self-diagnose themselves through the lens of found objects and literary acumen, respectively.

A feature on Michael Mazur, painter and printmaker, examines his work and artistic process, focusing on a series of Mazur's pieces inspired by The Divine Comedy.  This work is featured on AGNI's cover as well as in a set of color plates.  A DVD with the short film, Good to Pull, by filmmaker Robert Gardner, is included; the film provides a first-hand glimpse into the unique printing process Mazur employs to produce his stunning images.  Also included are an essay by Mazur and a note by Gardner.  All together, the feature fashions an fascinating portrait of an artist and his work, his mind and methods.

The poetry is of a uniform, high quality; I came away impressed with the diversity of voices, forms, and styles, all of them successful in their respective approaches.  Established poets are represented along with newer voices.  Rita Dove's three poems linked thematically around the life of violinist George Polgreen Bridgewater awed me with their evocative beauty and precision of language.  From "Seduction againt Exterior Plaster, Waning Gibbous":  Something purer, an appetite sans / soul or mercy, rinsed clean / of the human element /he felt rising in him once more...Robert Pinsky's scintillating "The Procession muses" on the Mauna Kea Observatories -- "an array of antenna sensitive to the colors of invisible light."  The concerns of the poem are the mysteries of the universe, the processes by which we attempt to understand these mysteries.  The poem marries the mythic and archetypical with the scientific, invoking Vishnu and "a procession of tiny paired tortoises crossing a galactic distance." Other standouts for me: a translation of Rilke from Sonnets to Orphans.  Emily Rosko's "Troupe Song".  "The Right to Slap Butts, If He Wants", a funny, poignant take on the basketball ritual of butt-slapping, leavened with intimations of mortality.  Sophie Cabot Black's "Dark Harbor". David Bottoms' "My Father Adjusts His Hearing Aid".

The fiction, like the poetry, is outstanding throughout.  This issue contains seven short fiction pieces and they cover a wide breadth of theme and topic under the umbrella of conventional fiction.  The most unconventional of the lot is Ronald Frame's "Caffe Doppio", detailing the rise and fall of a famed Italian cafe.  The piece reads like a profile out of a city newspaper, with a bittersweet, eulogistic tone that avoids sentimentality.  In the small span of five pages, the story crafts this hermetic world of the cafe with specificity, populates it with sharp incident and character.

"Manzanar" by Anis Shivani relates a man's time in a Japanese internment camp through his diary entries.  The story is powerfully told and moving, particularly in exploring the relationships the narrator has with one of the directors of the camp and an elderly woman who is also a prisoner.  Likewise, I enjoyed "Excommunicados" by Charles Haverty and "The Farms" by Eleanor Henderson.  "Excommunicados" deals with a pious boy whose friend's divorced mother has begun driving him to church, while "The Farms" revolves around an incident in which a young girl invites two black girls into her apartment when they are locked out of their own on a rainy day.  Both stories are first person narrated and possess wonderful, compelling voices which drew me into the characters' inner lives and predicaments.