Garage: Poems

by Aaron Fagan

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.

Genres: Poetry

56 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2007

About the author

Aaron Fagan is the author of Garage (Salt Publishing, 2007), Echo Train (Salt Publishing, 2010), A Better Place Is Hard to Find (The Song Cave, 2020), Pretty Soon (Pilot Press, 2023), and Atom and Void (Princeton University Press, 2025). His chapbooks include Gunpowder (Sungrazer Press, 2005), Fishing with Electricity (Old Omen, 2022), and Failure Atlas (Greying Ghost, 2023). Poems of his have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Boulevard, Granta, Harper's, The Kenyon Review, Liberties, Literary Imagination, The London Magazine, The New Criterion, Poem-A-Day, Prelude, and The Yale Review.

Reviews

[Peter Landau · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's more to poetry than I know, but I know that it's not more than words and I should appreciate those words and how they perform. I've tried to "figure them out" in the past and that only lead me away from poetry, which is not a good direction to go, and so I concluded that the poem doesn't have to be about what it's about but how it goes about its business. It's the kind of conclusion that's just the opposite of an ending. It's the beginning.

The poems of Aaron Fagan go about their business with efficient grace and fun. There is more than meets the eye and what my eye meets is more that what my mind can comprehend, and that's okay. I can tell that every word is placed exactly where it belongs and not one is used unnecessarily. There is an understanding that is processed not only through the cerebral gray fog of my head, but the cellular clarity of my body. I just know. That is poetry.