Atom and Void
Poems
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Princeton University Press
Published:21st Oct '25
Should be back in stock very soon
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.
"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."---Josh Barber, A New Measure
"Fagan is by turns wryly self-critical and mutedly humorous at a pitch almost beneath that of human hearing. If many a stanza in Atom and Void seem more parts than whole, those parts frequently have a compensatory power, with an advancing tide anticipating, a page later, 'Meditations at Sea Level' or 'fire saying farewell to fire' hinting at the burning sword barring the way to Eden ('I’m writing an essay in my head about Masaccio’s Expulsion'). Lyrically ironic, Fagan’s oeuvre is, by his own admission, intended as 'a protest aimed / At the librarians of the present and the future'—which makes him sound like a performance artist rather than a mild-mannered formalist."---Erick Verran, On the Seawall
"Fagan’s sonnets balloon and scrunch up, ranging from page-spanning lines to the single swan-diving sentence of 'Deepfake'. . . . Page by page, Fagan manipulates the sonnet with a close-up magician’s sleight of hand. Before your eyes, he’ll transform a sonnet into a coked-up shaggy-dog story, a meditation on a drive-in viewing of a Netflix exclusive movie, or even a macabre recipe for invisibility."---Christopher Spaide, Literary Hub
ISBN: 9780691278865
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
72 pages