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Aaron Fagan
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Aaron Fagan

Garage


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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
ISBN:  9781844713455
Author:  Aaron Fagan
Title:  Garage
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Jun-07
Extent:  76pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  5 mm
Weight:  114 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 8.99
Price:  USD 14.95
Rights:  World

 

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Short description/annotation:  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.

 

Main description:  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.

 

Meet the author

 

Table of contents:
Garage
Come and Get It
Private Number Calling
With Someone Else’s Telephone
Drastic Measures
Deus ex Machina
Doing My Part for the Tool and Die Industry
Grout
The Funeral Dinner
Resistentialism
Monopoly, Toledo
Like It Is
Looney Tunes
Oceanic
My Arrogance
Kabuki Hologram
“However, Some Tradition They Dispersed”
Water
Recall
Onycophagist
Aubade
The Determination Files
Confidence Art
Trick Photography
Porno Projector
Pretending to Surf in the Living Room
Card Trick
Cum Grano Salis
Fish Story
Mimeograph
Ira Furor Brevis Est
Verbatim ac Litteratim
Together
On My Mind
Night Office for Models in Milan
The House that Buster Keaton Built
Bar Harbor
Scatology
The Butterfly
To Dada
New Year’s Eve
Keatonesque
3 Gymnopédies
Autumn Wind Solo
Statements and Improvisations
Naked Leaf Dissolve
Lecanomancy
Making Light

 

View excerpt as PDF:

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Excerpt from book:  

Making Light

The gum on my left shoe as I walk
Across the carpet makes a sound
Close to little spits of radio static.
And the tug it gives my leg lets me
Know I am aware of my walking,
Lets me know I know where I am —
I am in my life, and in the library.
This is a rarity for me and I let
The rarity of it in, jog my memory,
And allow myself to wonder where
I was the last time this happened
And am I free enough to smile.

 

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

 

Unpublished endorsement :  Fagan's first book is vivid and aesthetically disturbing work. His
promise is considerable because his originality should prove to be
decisive.

Harold Bloom

 

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

 

Review quote:  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.

Jonathan Messinger
Time Out

 

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