Pretty Soon

by Aaron Fagan

“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

Aaron Fagan was born in Rochester, New York, in 1973, and is the author of Garage (Salt, 2007), Echo Train (Salt, 2010), and A Better Place Is Hard to Find (The Song Cave, 2020).

Cover artwork: ‘Fieldnote 2’ (gouache and pencil on paper, 2021) by Richard Porter

60 pages, Paperback

First published January 20, 2023

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

[Patrick Dacey · Rating 5 out of 5]

His best work to date. A masterpiece in A minor.