Aaron Fagan鈥檚 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鈥攊ts 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.
Aaron Fagan is the author of four previous poetry collections, including Pretty Soon and A Better Place Is Hard to Find. His poems have appeared in Harper’s, Granta, The New Republic, and other publications.
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"Each poem in Atom and Void is a sonnet . . . tasteful and meticulous. . . . Rather than being open and sprawling with implication, each sonnet is finely whittled, resulting in tongue-twisting lines posing the reader with a philosophical problem to decode."鈥擩osh Barber, A New Measure
“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
“Reading Atom and Void is like skating a M枚bius 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."—Zo毛 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. 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
