Agates 2023

In this issue of Agates, you will discover poems that thrum with life and ignite the core of our existence. Several of these 66 poets must have been channeling Emily Dickinson's ghost, as she appears on the page in a handful of poems including Roger Brezina's "Nevermore the Pursuit of Beauty" where "I've laid bouquets of love within your reach" as the narrator sends flowers of remembrance to Dickinson's Amherst home on her birthday. Dickinson, with her beautiful lyricism and experimental approach, is certainly integral to American poetry, but the poets of Agates have found inspiration not just in the past but in the tech-saturated present. In Pawel Buda's poem, the narrator has a searching conversation with an AI chatbot about what it means to be "alive", while Micah Ruelle's poetic monologue focuses on a social media encounter-- "a low rumbling across the tech ether"--that reminds us of our own mortality.