The intelligent, impeccably crafted poems in Garage, Aaron Fagan's debut collection, function as philosophical micro-treatises. From the working class angst of 'Doing My Part for the Tool and Die Industry' to the post-Romantic musings of 'Resistentialism,' Aaron Fagan's introspections cast light on a world in which the poem's speakers find themselves trying to make sense of the absurd, and the sense that's made is the poems themselves, which come to us as bits of gold sieved from the daily dross of human existence. -- Christopher Kennedy Fagan's first book is vivid and aesthetically disturbing work. His promise is considerable because his originality should prove to be decisive. -- Harold Bloom
Aaron Fagan was born in Rochester, New York, in 1973. Poems of his have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Boulevard, 5AM, Living Forge, Salt, Shenandoah, Stand, TriQuarterly, and The Yale Review. He lives in the Bronx.
Resolute, understated, and sometimes sullen, the debut volume from
New York City-based Fagan explores the poet’s doubts about his
vocation and his doubts about the worth of his art. A long poem set
“at Zebra Lounge in Chicago” recalls, “My beer was empty/ And I had
nothing to say./ Who knows what to say?” Another muses, “No need
for a poem/ To commemorate how inarticulate we are.” Other pages
chronicle post-collegiate dejection, a young man’s war on
still-undeclared ambitions, or else attempt with measured irony to
scale back the pretensions, and the inflated symbols, prior poets
have tried to use. Children in “Recall” remain enraptured when
adults grow bored and sad; a poem about waking up gets titled “My
Arrogance.” Though the title refers to the poet’s tastes in
underground rock and dance music, that music is little in evidence
here; more evident is the self-mocking, saturnine temper of such
precursors as Alan Dugan (from whom Fagan takes an appropriate
epigraph) or even Howard Nemerov. Yet even these anti-lyrics and
bedroom palinodes strive towards apt purposes: this poet so given
to humble skepticism he still tries to believe that “each thing we
make/ Results from the wild permutations of love.”
*Publishers Weekly*
In perhaps our favorite poem in the book, “Private Number Calling,”
the narrator’s cell phone rings, and a child on the other end asks,
“Who is it?” Fagan writes, “But you see I kept saying,/“Aaron, this
is Aaron.”/And the child (Too young/To tell whether it was a boy/Or
a girl) repeated, “Who is it?” The child remains calm, but the
narrator loses it, until the poem takes an unexpected, hopeful turn
in the end. It contains all that we loved about this first
collection: Fagan’s fuzzy and fragile take on the world.
*Time Out*
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