Echo Train

by Aaron Fagan

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.

"Somewhere along the continuum of black holes and dividing cells, televised moonlight and Sanskrit tattoos, Fagan makes a characteristic music—bluntly oblique, elegantly perforated—out of the sufferings and strange comedy of the everyday grotesque and everyday irrational, 'inventing / My reason to stay out of thin air.' This Echo Train reverberates with remnants of everything from souvenir T-shirts to ancient hymns while emerging into the jagged sound of its own present moment."
—Geoffrey O’Brien

"Aaron Fagan’s poems are perhaps best at what poetry itself is best at: taking the details of everyday life and finding something of philosophical significance. The way he does this—with some brutally beautiful sentences, incredible control of rhythm, and all those perfect final lines—is quirky enough that his writing is original and grounded enough that it always feels true."
—Matthew Welton

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

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.