Garage: Poems(Salt Modern Poets)

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.

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

About the Author :
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.

Review :
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.” 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.