Somewhere along the continuum of black holes and dividing cells, televised moonlight and Sanskrit tattoos, Fagan makes a
characteristic music out of the sufferings and strange comedy of the everyday grotesque
and everyday irrational. This Echo Train reverberates with remnants of everything from souvenir T-shirts to ancient hymns while
emerging into the jagged sound of its own present moment.
Geoffrey O'Brien
Aaron Fagan's poems are perhaps best at what poetry itself is best at: taking the details of everyday life and finding
something of philosophical significance. The way he does thiswith some brutally beautiful sentences, incredible control
of rhythm, and all those perfect final linesis quirky enough that his writing is original and grounded enough that it
always feels true.
Matthew Welton
Evident [in Garage] is the self-mocking, saturnine temper of such precursors as Alan Dugan or even Howard Nemerov. 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."
Publisher's Weekly
Plato wrote about the "old quarrel between philosophy and poetry." If the quarrel seemed old to Plato, to make it seem
new requires some serious ingenuity. In his inventive book, Garage, Fagan seems to be the poet for the job.
As much as Plato attacked poetry, he recognized something vital about a rhetorical stance made lyric; that vitality is
sharply present in the questions and turns of thought in Garage. Fagan both considers the "laws" of poetry and
breaks them, a mix that has made for an excellent first book.
Idra Novey, The Believer