Echo Train: Salt Modern Poets

Way 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

Aaron Fagan was born in Rochester, New York, and raised in Victor. He was educated at Hampshire College and Syracuse University where he specialized in poetry. He moved to Woodlawn in the Bronx in 2006 and was a copy and research editor for Scientific American magazine. Harold Bloom said his first collection of poems, Garage (Salt Publishing, 2007) was "vivid and aesthetically disturbing work" and that "his promise is considerable because his originality should prove to be decisive." And Idra Novey wrote in The Believer that "Fagan both considers the 'laws' of poetry and breaks them, a mix that has made for an excellent first book."