Verse case scenario

Fagan’s “The House That Buster Keaton Built,” snug in the middle of his first collection, begins with this: “Looks just as thrown together as I am—on edge/And tired of windows framing days.” It’s a quintessential line for Fagan—self-critical, touched lightly with humor, and displaying a preternatural ability to see himself in his surroundings, plucking meaning from inanimate objects. Fagan’s work is primarily occupied with distance; his verses often begin by acknowledging a remove from the subject—whether it be person, place or thing—and then, in the most hopeful of the poems, subtly closing in on it by the end.

In “Fish Story,” the narrator starts down a familiar path: “I always get the size, weight, bait, and time of day/All wrong. It’s your story.” Though the rest of the short poem considers the argument that ensues over the details—the “truth and untruth of the day”—it concludes with a reconciliation: “Hands above your head when the story is told, Regardless of the truth—we see something there.” It’s the type of connection Fagan writes about, a sort of sublime hookup that transcends the common fighting.

Much of what Fagan writes about could be traced back to an interest in loneliness. The bulk of the poems’ action revolves around a meditative solitude. There are plenty of silent or unspoken messages transmitted between strangers. Often it’s just a narrator and a piece of technology interacting. Ghosts—those apparitions that always appear when someone is alone—haunt more than a few of the poems here.

In perhaps our favorite poem in the book, “Private Number Calling,” the narrator’s cell phone rings, and a child on the other end asks, “Who is it?” Fagan writes, “But you see I kept saying,/“Aaron, this is Aaron.”/And the child (Too young/To tell whether it was a boy/Or a girl) repeated, “Who is it?” The child remains calm, but the narrator loses it, until the poem takes an unexpected, hopeful turn in the end. It contains all that we loved about this first collection: Fagan’s fuzzy and fragile take on the world.—Jonathan Messinger