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Aaron FaganGaragePoems |
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Biographical note: 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.
BIC Basic EAN13: 9781844713455
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Short
description/annotation: Aaron
Fagan’s debut collection glitters with
contemporary life, from poems on love, travel,
cartoons and shopping, sitting alongside lyrics
on channel surfing, philosophy and God. Gathering
together work from over a decade of writing,
Fagan takes us on tour through his metaphoric
Garage, the title signaling his musical forbears
in punk and electronic music. On our way, through
improvisations, trials and errors, we join
him in a world where invention and failure
are indistinguishable parts of the journey,
and Fagan makes the ideal companion, in love
with the world and its characters, filled with
hope and humor.
Main description: The title of this book is taken from the genres of punk and electronic music and forms the way Aaron Fagan experienced these poems as he wrote them over the course of the past ten years—also as if they were, taken together, a kind of working purgatory, a garage as a place of trial and error where invention and failure are indistinguishable.
Meet the author:
Table of contents:
View excerpt as PDF:
Excerpt from book: Making Light
Unpublished endorsement : The intelligent, impeccably crafted poems in Garage, Aaron Fagan’s debut collection, function as philosophical micro-treatises.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
Review quote: 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
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