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	<title>Aaron Fagan</title>
	<link>https://aaronfagan.com</link>
	<description>Aaron Fagan</description>
	<pubDate>Thu, 08 May 2025 16:19:03 +0000</pubDate>
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		<title>Home</title>
				
		<link>https://aaronfagan.com/Home</link>

		<pubDate>Sat, 01 Feb 2020 17:37:58 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Aaron Fagan</dc:creator>

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		<description>AARON FAGAN


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		<title>About</title>
				
		<link>https://aaronfagan.com/About</link>

		<pubDate>Sun, 02 Feb 2020 13:03:59 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Aaron Fagan</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://aaronfagan.com/About</guid>

		<description>
&#60;img width="1020" height="1076" width_o="1020" height_o="1076" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/27b0a3707d94124c35b37a7ddc87c3682dca50d1e4e113d00b82cd704a2e5793/Aaron-Fagan.jpg" data-mid="209979432" border="0"  src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/27b0a3707d94124c35b37a7ddc87c3682dca50d1e4e113d00b82cd704a2e5793/Aaron-Fagan.jpg" /&#62;

Aaron Fagan&#38;nbsp;is the author of Atom and Void (Princeton University Press, Princeton &#38;amp; Oxford, 2025),&#38;nbsp;Pretty Soon (Pilot Press, London, 2023),&#38;nbsp;A Better Place Is Hard to Find (The Song Cave, New York, 2020), Echo Train (Salt, London, 2010),&#38;nbsp;and&#38;nbsp;Garage (Salt, Cambridge, 2007).&#38;nbsp;Poems have appeared, or are due to appear, in Autre,&#38;nbsp;Bennington Review, Changes Review, Granta, Harper’s, Image, Liberties, Mutt Art Review,&#38;nbsp;The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, Raritan, and Washington Square Review.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/aaron-fagan

Photograph by Camilla Ha</description>
		
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		<title>Books</title>
				
		<link>https://aaronfagan.com/Books</link>

		<pubDate>Sat, 01 Feb 2020 21:32:00 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Aaron Fagan</dc:creator>

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		<description>&#60;img width="400" height="612" width_o="400" height_o="612" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7c6084a73ef4c7cc09622349332eb0df8578abf5817bfbc7720809d684a0f2d6/Atom-and-Void.jpg" data-mid="233641894" border="0"  src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/400/i/7c6084a73ef4c7cc09622349332eb0df8578abf5817bfbc7720809d684a0f2d6/Atom-and-Void.jpg" /&#62;
atom and void(Princeton University Press, 2025)
“Aaron Fagan’s Atom and Void is quizzical and austere, a series of philosophical meditations that strikes sparks with the flint and steel of paradox and tautology. Ezra Pound invented the term logopoeia, ‘the dance of the intellect among words,’ precisely for poems like ‘The Erotic Life of Property,’ which begins with a strange counterfactual, ‘A truck delivers a forest back to itself / As lumber in the field where it once / Stood as trees’ and ends with a lump in the throat: ‘a darkness / In the heart breaks its lost ground.’ Fagan’s irony is as lightly worn as his intellect in these concise but tremendous poems.”—ange mlinko
“If one version of our genesis starts with Adam and Eve veering into disobedience, a better might begin with Atom and Void—matter and vacuum, presence and absence, being and nothingness—combining in ways that are both arbitrary and ultimately inevitable. Like ‘walls risen from one chaos’ that ‘stand alone against another chaos,’ each of Fagan’s mesmerizing rectangles of language is a monument of exquisite interruption to the silence that lies on either side of it.”—Timothy Donnelly
“Reading Atom and Void is like skating around a Möbius strip. One face is metaphysical: slippery arguments about what we see and don’t see, elaborate dissections of what we know and can’t or won’t know. The other face flickers with the tactile horrors of a too-real world: an action figure of Goya’s Devoured Son meets Hello Kitty, a louche party ends in vomit, a detailed manual for rendering oneself invisible begins with the acquisition of a severed head. Think Stevens twisted by Escher and infused with Lynch. Fagan has done something timeless, freakish, and wholly terrific here—something like ‘Taking the sky out of a mourning dove / To sing in the voice of the storm it travels / Through with the aura of an emissary.’”
—zoë hitzig
reviews
“Page by page, Fagan manipulates the sonnet with a close-up magician’s sleight of hand.&#38;nbsp;Before your eyes, he’ll transform a sonnet into a coked-up shaggy-dog story, a meditation on a drive-in viewing of a Netflix exclusive movie, or even a macabre recipe for invisibility... For Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the sonnet was ‘a moment’s monument’; for Fagan, the sonnet monumentalizes a moment’s accumulating redundancy, its breathtaking obsolescence.”—christopher spaide, literary hub
“Fagan is by turns wryly self-critical and mutedly humorous at a pitch almost beneath that of human hearing. If many a stanza in Atom and Void seem more parts than whole, those parts frequently have a compensatory power, with an advancing tide anticipating, a page later, ‘Meditations at Sea Level’ or ‘fire saying farewell to fire’ hinting at the burning sword barring the way to Eden (‘I’m writing an essay in my head about Masaccio’s Expulsion’). Lyrically ironic, Fagan’s oeuvre is, by his own admission, intended as ‘a protest aimed / At the librarians of the present and the future’—which makes him sound like a performance artist rather than a mild-mannered formalist.”—Erick Verran, on the seawall
“Each poem in Atom and Void is a sonnet . . . tasteful and meticulous. . . . Rather than being open and sprawling with implication, each sonnet is finely whittled, resulting in tongue-twisting lines posing the reader with a philosophical problem to decode.”—Josh Barber, a new measure
&#60;img width="400" height="464" width_o="400" height_o="464" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d19bdcca85455ab8d4a643009a8a3f7496e0f1fe8716d97bdf29d06d4352e99d/Pretty-Soon.jpg" data-mid="162358185" border="0"  src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/400/i/d19bdcca85455ab8d4a643009a8a3f7496e0f1fe8716d97bdf29d06d4352e99d/Pretty-Soon.jpg" /&#62;Pretty Soon
(Pilot Press, 2023)
“Aaron Fagan’s colloquial voice—by turns mordant, enlightening, despairing, but always witty—not only describes a deeply compelling, interior emotional atmosphere, but a world we’ve made together, and how best to live in it. An astonishing collection.”
—Hilton Als

 
“Tight, heady, and beautiful: Aaron Fagan’s sonnets obey an invisible procedure that lends his lines a sculptural, haunted equilibrium. Reading these finely wrought poems, I felt like I was being massaged inside a hall of mirrors, and the masseurs, many-handed, were legendary poets of the past. Pretty Soon is wisdom literature, comfort food, night school, Socratic candy, and high-wire elegance.”—Wayne Koestenbaum “What most distinguishes Aaron Fagan’s poetry is its range and capacity for surprise, as well as its velocity. From careening, free-form meditations, to homage, to Algren-esque realism, sometimes a blending of all of the above, it makes for invigorating reading. A highly individual American voice.”—August Kleinzahler“The sonnets in Pretty Soon dance in beauty like the light: compression, abstraction, impossible ideas lucidly expressed, political and personal truths lucidly slipped out as if in somebody else’s dream, woven through the even-seeming but subliminally jagged surface of the words. Reflections reflect metamorphic awareness, words slide into different words, phrases arouse recollections of other voices. All gathered in, turned to ethical account. Measured and forceful, ‘casual but final,’ these poems stand by their words, and in them.”—Ian Patterson

&#60;img width="400" height="545" width_o="400" height_o="545" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/66282c9e8c4c3163401ebb589a096c0cae3bbd0266f542a632fa545f773c0910/9781734035155.jpg" data-mid="77489362" border="0"  src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/400/i/66282c9e8c4c3163401ebb589a096c0cae3bbd0266f542a632fa545f773c0910/9781734035155.jpg" /&#62;A Better Place Is Hard to Find(The Song Cave, 2020)
“Aaron Fagan’s A Better Place Is Hard to Find contains some of the finest poems I’ve read in years. At once fluid, blistering, and visionary, Fagan’s poems are marvels that I admire for their beauty, their craft, and their fearlessness in the search for truth. What a poet!”—Rowan Ricardo Phillips
“Witty, inventive, surprising, uplifting, but also drawn to probe the darker recesses of the human psyche, the poems collected here reveal Aaron Fagan at his most compelling. This volume will surely enhance his status as one of the brightest stars in the American poetic firmament.”—Mark Ford

“Aaron Fagan’s marvelous A Better Place Is Hard to Find revels in ideas without being at all intellectualized.&#38;nbsp; Rather, he takes pleasure in the sheer feel of them as they unfold in long, sinuous sentences, a pleasure the reader shares, even though the poems are not so much addressed to a reader as overheard by one.&#38;nbsp; His poetry feels like it flows on endlessly, ‘Full of what we did or didn’t do, said / Or didn’t say, but it comes and goes, / (Like all things clear) like nothing clear.’”—John Koethe
“I read A Better Place Is Hard to Find with delight and admiration. I love Fagan’s blunt delicacy and rich plain speech.”
—Lucy Sante
“I’ve been savoring the elegance of A Better Place Is Hard to Find. The poems are rightly mysterious (not mystifying), dignified, suggestive, sinister where they ought to be.”—Rosanna Warren

 “It redeems things to know Aaron Fagan is out there, ‘filled with feedback,’ writing poems so grandly (cosmologically) but also humbly aware. I like very much the oscillation between the inscrutable transparencies of the shorter-line poems and the inconclusive stampedes of abundance in the longer-line ones. A Better Place Is Hard to Find made me think of Marianne Moore’s observation that it’s a privilege to see so much confusion. One result of the oscillation is a kind of grace, even if disabused.”—Douglas Crase

“Aaron Fagan has a fascinatingly mercurial way with the poetic statement, partly syntax but largely diction. I have been reading with pleasure A Better Place Is Hard to Find and agreeing wholeheartedly first with the one, then with the other sense of his title’s claim. The figures and meanings are ever in motion—or, if we are on a path, each phrase, each stepping stone stays firm until the foot leaves it, when it dissolves without a trace—leaving the reader in turn no choice but to proceed with him on the . . . inspiriting search. Ashbery is capable of sustaining this kind of magic, as is Stevens, though less obsessively, but it is a rare gift, in my experience.”—Stephen Yenser“A Better Place is Hard to Find dwells in the liminal zone between possibility and fate, between memory and fantasy, showing how the process of trying to figure out what went wrong in a life, going back over our tracks in the mud, muddying them more, writing and overwriting, is actually the process of creating a new terrain for new life, an endlessly updated library of dreams and experience.”
—Kylan Rice, Annulet: A Journal of Poetics“In his new book, A Better Place Is Hard to Find, Aaron Fagan explores the chasm between what exists, and what we bring into existence. The collection glows red with a sort of divine anxiety, a propulsive panicked search for some world more stable than the one we have made for ourselves. A better place.”—Ethan Cohen, Gasher Journal

&#60;img width="400" height="618" width_o="400" height_o="618" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1c3ef058f5bf038139cc96e9d7d2cc5fc5a78b0f57ff91c5deddc641cb47a242/9781844717491_1024x1024.jpeg" data-mid="60019422" border="0"  src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/400/i/1c3ef058f5bf038139cc96e9d7d2cc5fc5a78b0f57ff91c5deddc641cb47a242/9781844717491_1024x1024.jpeg" /&#62;Echo Train (Salt Publishing, 2010)
“Somewhere along the continuum of black holes and dividing cells, televised moonlight and Sanskrit tattoos, Fagan makes a characteristic music—bluntly oblique, elegantly perforated—out of the sufferings and strange comedy of the everyday grotesque and everyday irrational, ‘inventing / My reason to stay out of thin air.’ 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 this—with some brutally beautiful sentences, incredible control of rhythm, and all those perfect final lines—is quirky enough that his writing is original and grounded enough that it always feels true.”
—Matthew Welton“Like his debut collection, Garage, Aaron Fagan’s Echo Train is a short book of short poems. Its full page of epigraphs—from Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, and Hayden Carruth—makes it look like a child facing an adult on a see-saw. And yet, like a string-theorist positing extra dimensions, Fagan somehow evens the equation. With lines of roughly equal length, widespread enjambment rarely employed for obvious semantic effects, and a fondness for unexpected turns of phrase and grammar, the typical Fagan poem has a powerful forward flow, trailing whirlpools of complexity.”—Paul Franz, Foreword Reviews

&#60;img width="400" height="618" width_o="400" height_o="618" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/43cd161089eff308468b49c4dd4b02845362f647dced2df2e67b982ada86e31c/9781844713455.jpeg" data-mid="60019393" border="0"  src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/400/i/43cd161089eff308468b49c4dd4b02845362f647dced2df2e67b982ada86e31c/9781844713455.jpeg" /&#62;
Garage 
(Salt Publishing, 2007)
“Fagan’s first book is vivid and aesthetically disturbing work. His promise is considerable because his originality should prove to be decisive.”—Harold Bloom&#38;nbsp;

“Way back in the book-writing era, Plato wrote about the ‘old quarrel between philosophy and poetry.’ If the quarrel seemed old to Plato while writing The Republic, to make it seem new in 2007 requires some serious ingenuity. In his inventive first book, Garage, Aaron Fagan seems to be the poet for the job. Like Plato, Fagan is interested in definitions: what kind of philosophizing in a poem is an unearned indulgence, while another sort of philosophizing might qualify as art . . . . 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
“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
“Evident [in Garage] 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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		<title>Readings</title>
				
		<link>https://aaronfagan.com/Readings</link>

		<pubDate>Thu, 08 May 2025 16:19:03 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Aaron Fagan</dc:creator>

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readings

Poetry Foundation; Chicago, 2026.


Blacksburg Books; Blacksburg, VA, 2026.
ferrum college; ferrum, VA, 2026.


Amant café; Brooklyn, NY, 2026.


Tyler Museum of Art; Tyler, TX, 2025.


Deep Vellum Books; Dallas, 2025.


Basket Books &#38;amp; Art; Houston, fall 2025.


Trinosophes Projects; Detroit, 2025.


Unnameable Books; Brooklyn, NY, 2025.


KGB Monday night poetry; New York, 2025. 


Basket Books &#38;amp; Art; Houston, spring 2025.


Galveston Artists Residency; Galveston, TX, 2025.


Tibet House; New York, 2021.




Malvern Books; Austin, 2021.


Brazos Bookstore; Houston, 2020.


KGB Monday Night Poetry; New York, 2019.


Mixer Reading Series; Brooklyn, NY, 2017.


Collyer Bristow Gallery; London, 2016.


Book Court; Brooklyn, NY, 2012.


Knockdown Center; Queens, NY, 2012.


Mixer Reading Series; New York, 2010.


Chin Music at the Pacific Standard; Brooklyn, NY, 2009.


Harold Clurman Poetry Series—Stella Adler Studio; New York, 2009.


The Stain of Poetry; Brooklyn, NY, 2009.Cornelia Street Café; New York, 2008.



Writers &#38;amp; Books; Rochester, NY, 2008.


Myopic Books; Chicago, 2007.


Mixer Reading Series; New York, 2007.Emerson College; Boston, 2004.
Cornell University; Ithaca, NY, 2004.Syracuse University; Syracuse, NY, 2003.

mental graffiti; Chicago, 2001.
Memorial Art Gallery; Rochester, NY, 1998.







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	<item>
		<title>Poems</title>
				
		<link>https://aaronfagan.com/Poems</link>

		<pubDate>Tue, 07 Nov 2023 22:47:49 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Aaron Fagan</dc:creator>

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Three Kinds of Everything

Dawn approaches and abundances stampede,Our bodies make love as we weep and dreamWith an effulgent smell of death engulfing us,We lie to each other about the way we feel,Bend time, curve space, to discover, in tandem,What love is only by what is left of love whenLove returns, whether by death or dismantlement,To begin, inch by inch, through suffering and song,As though this unrehearsed, yet familiar, way leadsTo the place breath insists us on to, melting edgesOff the fact we have come so far yet just begun,What happens stalls out within the fear we haveSeen the truth of an instance a little too clearlyAnd now we are living only for emergencies.
[First appeared with The Poetry Society of America]
HarmonySisyphus punches in, each morning,At a mountain he must face all day,In hell, for eternity, and at night,Having not reached the summitAgain, he walks down slow, whereThe rock rushed by, careful to see,With new eyes, where it all wentDown, again, and then later,At the bar in town, sits cooling hisBleeding hands against a whiskey,On the rocks, and maps new paths,On a napkin, inside the wet ringHis tumbler made, again and again,The routes running on to absurdLengths, hands shaking, and if itWasn’t a map, you might thinkIt was the history of historyOr parts of a nude in repose,Patient with death and belonging.
[First appeared with Poem-A-Day, The Academy of American Poets]
The Good LightThere were always such beautiful shadows in your work,Though many now dodge their taxes with your art. RarelyAs it seems, life involves death with every decision, which isWhy I miss the non-Euclidean idiom we used to argue overEverything in the dictionary of what not to do. SomewhereIn a mix between Beaches and Häxan I have these weirdMemories of you sleeping when there’s no way I was thereTo see you sleeping—a crystal ball above your bed letsTensors, in a tension of tenses, tongue-tie time and divineYour urge to fearlessly abandon yourself to love as youUnderstand love, where paradox gives way to paradoxAnd awareness is congratulated with awareness of howThis multiverse, in vast tribulation, ushers us on in unisonAs one of many big bangs begins again to light the way.
[First appeared with Poem-A-Day, The Academy of American Poets and Literary Hub]Night Blossoms

Once there was this kid in the front rowRaising his hand as though he would turnInto a ball of light and vanish if he didn’tAnswer the question the teacher was asking.I was convinced I’d grow up to be a samuraiBack then, so I didn’t understand a word,But before the kid could answer, anotherKid boxed the ears of another kid and itWas chaos in the way nature is a chaos.The rain has been lying to the sun again.And heaven loves knives. Bathe in the dust.Flocks of surprise descend from on high.Grass flourishes between the words whereSorrow is isosceles and red goes black veryQuickly in the light that increases the light.When I quit smoking, I became scared to fly.Needles tack in their gauges to extremes.The sun keeps us. Infinities are a poker faceHidden in this moment. We read a line of lifeAnd we twitch in an iron dream that remainsBlinded by the shadows of their referent stars.Words are drawings that will be missedAnd this guy won’t answer the waitress whenShe puts his order in the computer and asksHim how many eggs he wants—he keepsSaying: Look, just tell them it’s for Tim.Absence affects sleep and hands bloomIn a desert in me. I kiss the voice I hearAnd pick flowers from my veins.Fog is writing a world inside a word.Bones cannot hide their light. The originalRoad runs ahead collapsing into nightfall.
[First appeared in Granta]

 
Quietus

Before my memory leaves,I would like to say, one lateSummer afternoon, daylightWas at its peak intensity,The lights were off inside,Everywhere, then throughThe windows, the light madeIts own light in the absenceOf light, and an effect, quiteReal, grand and ineffable—As precisely inscrutableAs the present momentAnd as quickeningly sublime—Raked through the room.I stood there a long time,Alone, and had to liveWith a distinct feeling,Radiating from the condition,Something complete had beenFiled with the terrible libraryOf dreams and experienceThat were about to begin.
[First appeared in Granta]
Arrow of Time

Take the time we were all in bed after a day
At the lake, where the smell of fresh sheets
Mingled with the dead fish, weed, and beer
Rising from our skin as we drifted to sleep
In a nest, and I dreamt we were wanted,
Running through the woods for dear life
(Because we are together) breathless,
And when we rest, I stay up the night
Fighting to keep my eyes open as morning
Comes, not for fear of being caught,
But that sleep would take the way I feel,
Our futures folded in on the past,
Leaving a tangle of echoes in the present.
We are a funeral pyre and a bonfire,
The whole is not the sum of its parts,
The parts contain the whole,
And the whole contains the parts—
There is just this mountain of us,
A flare of light, and this empty awareness—
Ghost platitudes of the aboriginal star.
I still hear but can't remember who it was
Who laughed through their teeth as they
Bit my ear and tickled me awake
For farting and hogging all the room.
Seeing too much is seeing too little—
The sun in your eye is unfathomed time
With no regard for who and what remains,
An unending arrow of irrevocable loss.
[First appeared in Poetry Northwest]
Cargo CultMy die-cut heart has grown implacably thinOn a hardscrabble fantasy, but that’s loveFor you, dangling on a chain of keys to nothing.She’s an insomniac drooling in the sun, my heartThat is, a thousand roses pressed in a book of flesh.That’s not the dumbest thing I could say but close.How about hunger is a voice field dressing a liveWolf as we make out with it—the improper fitOf our mouths pressing together in abject passion,As its fur, a slipped-off negligee, drops to the floorWith measurable attack, sustain, and decay.Blood resigns from the body as a voice says,Yes, say that, except rise and fight with SatanWho has long loved God more than any man.
[First appeared in The Kenyon Review]
Limitless AgainDeplete the ascent, carving up your arms,
Returning flirty glances with the windows.
A film will attend this so don’t bother,
Efforts dismay affections, and that’s how
It was at the end of a dinner party, we’d
Release a few bad opinions and think we’re
Saved. At least, that’s how I would choose
To remember it, and if a batch of Gods fell
Out of the sky to correct me, then so be it.
I suppose one could do worse than have our
Police feign to assemble in the plaza to patch
Things up in time for the fairest election.
The outliers inside me continue to drown,
Even try desperately to raise their hands
As if trying to vote for an unspecific good.
The only defense I use is my dedication.
I am and I am not and there’s no difference.
However, the other hands are crossing fingers.
Welcome to my anachronism. Dirty, filthy,
Stinking wretch that I am, I am still on time.
That was a joke aimed to please and discomfit.
My design was supposed to make life easier,
But there’s no evidence the host will seat me
In the ballroom filled with investors which
Is totally fine with me, yet not altogether
Unprecedented, seeing as we would just give
The slip to things like this in the old days.
Isn’t there a word for all of this anyway?
The anointed no longer wish to be anointed.
I drove through the night and parked out back.
Walking through the warehouse with a wood
Case full of trains and buses, I go to my bench,
Turn on a light, and pull out the best engine
To disappear from the full-scale world down
Through anonymous tunnels, past trees
And people all meticulously assembled.
With my headlamp tipped to the world, I am
The man in the moon, relentlessly in love.
[First appeared in The Yale Review]
Love
Say it’s a form of heat that doesn’t riseBut passes from one body to the next.Say it ﬂows through you and then outAnd back in again, a ghostly threadWeaving a basic pattern inside of youThat will slowly begin to take the shapeOf what you’ll think you can describe.
[First appeared in The Yale Review]


The UnansweringI thought I saw a bee’sNest made of cigarette buttsHanging from the ceiling fan.

Each turn of the winding airDivined my rest an inelegantProof no one cares to hear.

I mottled the idea of whoI came to be with sootAs drapes caressed the snow

Globe filled with venomOn the sill where moths,By their measure, lined up,

One by one, unrolling theirTongues to sip and drizzleLines across a canvas laced

With gunpowder burningBright around the paintedParts where you used to be.
[First published in Harper’s]
The Erotic Life of PropertyA truck delivers a forest back to itselfAs lumber in the field where it onceStood as trees—what is not lumberListens close, breathes witness intoThe absence of what’s to becomeOf what once was there, closingThe spaces between old shadowsResolved into new forms, a singleSurface: Walls risen from one chaosStand alone against another chaos—Who dares to breathe listens, or goesMad against the grain—tilled under,Folded back against itself—a darknessIn the heart breaks its lost ground.
[First published in The New Republic]

Stained GlassI hear people are concerned over questions of happiness.All day, our new neighbors make noise, reminding meTo continue reducing the things I feel compelled to say.The couple is miserable about not reaching their goalsAs if having them sets a kind of alarm to go on upstreamWhere no one is equipped to turn it off, and everyoneThinks this is a reality show just for them, but it’s aboutThe neighbors, remember? Their loneliness, not yours.The way their light is being spent across the green earth,Not yours. I walked around for an hour trying to comeUp with a better way to break the news to you but everyWord came out of a mouth inside of a mouth. The handIs different, this time, but the note we carry is the same.No one will ask you what this was about when it’s over.
[First appeared in The London Magazine]</description>
		
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		<title>Videos</title>
				
		<link>https://aaronfagan.com/Videos</link>

		<pubDate>Sun, 02 Feb 2020 19:47:46 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Aaron Fagan</dc:creator>

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		<description>

“under the rose” featuring chloë sevigny





on a drive-in viewing of the other side of the wind





a beginner's guide to invisibility





i had to go nowhere





variations of incomplete open cubes





francisco goya





Men with Scars on Their Heads





Harmony





Cocaine in Sears Tower





The Deluge





Animal Magnetism





Cargo Cult





The Good Light




Quietus





Panopticon</description>
		
	</item>
		
		
	<item>
		<title>Contact</title>
				
		<link>https://aaronfagan.com/Contact</link>

		<pubDate>Sun, 02 Feb 2020 14:06:00 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Aaron Fagan</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://aaronfagan.com/Contact</guid>

		<description>

CONTACT

&#60;img width="2048" height="2048" width_o="2048" height_o="2048" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/096feb8644a540ab0d51ee6e0ccfaf0a9221a876db4ba16982532e3641e8609d/584856b4e0bb315b0f7675ac.png" data-mid="88729282" border="0" data-scale="26" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/096feb8644a540ab0d51ee6e0ccfaf0a9221a876db4ba16982532e3641e8609d/584856b4e0bb315b0f7675ac.png" /&#62;

&#60;img width="1484" height="1539" width_o="1484" height_o="1539" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4ab84022ef97c509348602add5ce4263664938331bf64bed95a46e0166e15c1f/5ecec78673e4440004f09e77.png" data-mid="88729858" border="0" data-scale="16" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4ab84022ef97c509348602add5ce4263664938331bf64bed95a46e0166e15c1f/5ecec78673e4440004f09e77.png" /&#62;
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