Echo Train begins Once upon a time / Books began this / Way and asks us not to be shocked to find / We must return and / Stand for what we are when we reach the book's end.
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Echo Train begins Once upon a time / Books began this / Way and asks us not to be shocked to find / We must return and / Stand for what we are when we reach the book's end. Readers who said they tend to avoid poetry altogether sat down with the intention of reading one or two poems and found themselves reading it all the way through in a single sitting.
Fagan's first book is vivid and aesthetically disturbing work. His promise is considerable because his originality should prove to be decisive.
-- Harold BloomEvident [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.'
-- Publisher's WeeklyFagan's work is primarily occupied with distance; his verses often begin by acknowledging a remove from the subject - whether is be person, place or thing - end then, in the most hopeful of poems, subtly closing in on it by the end.
-- Jonathan Messinger, Time Out ChicagoWay 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