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Atom and Void: Poems
A collection of wry and fiercely intelligent sonnets from a widely praised poet
Aaron Fagan’s Atom and Void is a dazzling and haunting meditation on existence and impermanence. This collection of sonnets delves into the fragility of perception, the boundaries between self and other, and the ways language fractures and recombines to illuminate meaning. Drawing on influences as diverse as physics, art, and philosophy, the poems balance precision with abstraction, creating a space where the reader encounters the immediacy of experience alongside its inevitable fading.
What emerges is a deeply personal yet universal reckoning with the nature of being—its joys, its terrors, and the unrelenting beauty of its transience. These poems do not seek to provide answers but to embody the questions that shape our lives. The result is a work that both disrupts and comforts, holding the reader in a delicate balance of wonder and disquiet. With its thematic range and lyrical precision, Atom and Void is an extraordinary contribution to contemporary poetry.
“Reading Atom and Void is like skating a Möbius strip—one continuous surface where metaphysical inquiry and tactile horror loop into and through each other. Fagan has done something timeless, freakish, and wholly terrific—he is, in his own words, ‘Taking the sky out of a mourning dove / To sing in the voice of the storm it travels / Through.’”—Zoë Hitzig, author of Not Us Now
“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, author of Chariot
“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. Fagan’s irony is as lightly worn as his intellect in these concise but tremendous poems.”—Ange Mlinko, author of Foxglovewise: Poems
Aaron Fagan’s Atom and Void is a dazzling and haunting meditation on existence and impermanence. This collection of sonnets delves into the fragility of perception, the boundaries between self and other, and the ways language fractures and recombines to illuminate meaning. Drawing on influences as diverse as physics, art, and philosophy, the poems balance precision with abstraction, creating a space where the reader encounters the immediacy of experience alongside its inevitable fading.
What emerges is a deeply personal yet universal reckoning with the nature of being—its joys, its terrors, and the unrelenting beauty of its transience. These poems do not seek to provide answers but to embody the questions that shape our lives. The result is a work that both disrupts and comforts, holding the reader in a delicate balance of wonder and disquiet. With its thematic range and lyrical precision, Atom and Void is an extraordinary contribution to contemporary poetry.
“Reading Atom and Void is like skating a Möbius strip—one continuous surface where metaphysical inquiry and tactile horror loop into and through each other. Fagan has done something timeless, freakish, and wholly terrific—he is, in his own words, ‘Taking the sky out of a mourning dove / To sing in the voice of the storm it travels / Through.’”—Zoë Hitzig, author of Not Us Now
“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, author of Chariot
“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. Fagan’s irony is as lightly worn as his intellect in these concise but tremendous poems.”—Ange Mlinko, author of Foxglovewise: Poems
- GenresPoetry
72 pages, Paperback
Published October 21, 2025
14 people want to read
About the author
Aaron Fagan
13 books17 followersAaron 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.
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June 28, 2025
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