Aidan Fine's A Nest This Size is a journey embarked on via contradictory terms that occur when one attempts to explore the limitations of human (vs?) sentient abidance. Postmodern problems with things and places such as home, body, language, tradition, sleeve, machine/vehicle and rabbit hole become the relative metastructures through which these contradictions are channeled. Meaning neither nestles nor settles in Aidan Fine's complex Nest. Rather, it skates over playful diction and grammatical gaming, bringing levity to this thoughtful book about the evanescent rationality of emotional life. And yet there is also grief here, and the pain of desire, both offset by the beautiful mystical quality of lines such as, a sleuth of wind interjects meaning into a room or, I would rather surmise a doctrine of affections, and mirror what is vivid. A Nest this Size is a stunning debut. -Jennifer Moxley While Aidan Fine's poetry may appear to be written in soft ink, it's fright-ening, stern and unflinching in its observations of human terror and wonder. It's a poetry that makes us ask who is listening, who is speaking, who is recording, and who is witnessing. His poems, intelligent, energetic, serious and yet playful, scrutinize how we connect, how we separate, and if anything or anyone even cares. He writes, 'The future is all epilogues, starting now,' and we are fortunate to lean in and listen. -Jenny Boully Aidan Fine dreams two dreams here, a short one and a very long one, and like the good doctor said they can be read as cause and effect. 'A pillow inquiry' is buoyant and airy, still intensely tinged by eros (or its ghost), and like good pillow talk its tautologies recall the jokes pleasure told the lover about how superfluous mere logic might be. The long aftermath is prose, mulling its way down the page of that past, dear diary, haunted by the memory and possible return of a you not merely shadow. Meanwhile, logic's sadly become as necessary as it is unavailing-'pain,' Frank O'Hara said, 'always produces logic, which is very bad for you.' Here tautology becomes the rueful mark of that restless knowledge, a joke on the self; but also a hint or hope that as thinking exhausts itself something else might return. Which it does, though it's not the longed for past, but what lay under it, finally glimpsed: 'There is also a small door in the air, almost invisible, oh much less; pine breathing. I do not have the power or desire to shut such a door. I awake in its opening. In the last moments, the sun leaves me alone, to say it is so.' Aidan Fine's self-erasing project here is canny and funny, lovely and brave, wise and hard-won. This is a beautiful book. -Tenney Nathanson