Circle in the Square: A Review of ATOM AND VOID by Aaron Fagan

Aaron Fagan

Atom and Void: Poems

Princeton University Press / 2025 / 55 pp / $17.95

Reviewed by Melissa Shepherd / May 2026

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Aaron Fagan’s Atom and Void proves the paradox of freedom in constraint. Within the confines of their tidy boxes, the book’s fifty-five one-stanza sonnets range through existential ideas and loop together without section breaks in an ongoing interrogation of knowledge and perception. As its title suggests, opposing forces shape Atom and Void, Fagan’s fifth poetry collection and second devoted to the sonnet after 2023’s Pretty Soon. Being meets nonbeing, intimacy meets distance, the spiritual meets the earthbound, abstraction meet concrete imagery. The load-bearing walls of the sonnet manage to both hold the tension of these forces and to circulate it out—making for an eclectic, intellectually demanding mix of poems greater than the sum of its parts.  

Many are bursting at their fourteen-line seams, like the opener, “We Who Are About to Die Salute You,” which presses hard on perceptions of self and time from the first line: “For starters, my ignorance is what resents what outlasts me.” (Memorable titles and punchy first lines are a strength throughout the book.) “A friend shares the same story differently every time we meet. / They are all my favorite version,” the poem continues, and a few lines down, “Everyone resumes what they were doing, believing they do things / A little better for each other than they did the day or generation / Before. How then to describe the wars?” Propelled by contradiction and quick-fire leaps in thought, the poem never lets up.

Other poems are taut with spare language, paring the sonnet to a skinny column, like the leanest poem of the book, “Deepfake,” which slices into the circularity of self in one sharp sentence:

Once you

Realize you

Cannot be

Anything

More than

Who you

Already are,

Why would

You ever

Want to

Let anyone

Know who

You have

Always been?

The poem typifies Fagan’s ability to keep to the sonnet’s “box” with symmetrical line lengths, while not compromising the surprise and doubleness of his lineation; each line is couplet-like in how it amplifies the tensions of self (image versus reality, change versus permanence) and puts heft behind the poem’s central question.

The ordering of Atom and Void is as precise as the lineation and has an additive effect. Like most of the book’s poems, “Deepfake” builds on the one before it, “Men with Scars on Their Heads,” which also contemplates self-perception. “You wait while they / Change out the lenses,” the speaker in the latter poem says, and later,

. . . The brief

Sign that presents itself

To the pitying eye

Promises we will all

See ourselves in the end.

If in this poem, as in others, the reader sometimes wishes for more context clues to anchor the big ideas, the speaker here perhaps offers guidance on embracing the mystery of the work instead: “I find it preferable / To read things I do not / Understand.”

Some poems are so closely woven they act like bonded pairs. When the speaker in the title poem meditates on his sensory impulses, “I open a book, forgetting how to read / The moment the sun begins to shine,” the poem opposite it, “Between Things and Words,” echoes him: “Seeing too much is seeing too little. / An image passes, then that possesses.” Likewise, when the speaker in “Atom and Void” says, “I was never told the soul is not for sale,” the speaker on the other side of the page takes the thought further: “I dismiss this heaven and call it hell. / I belong to the silence of the end.” It’s not that the poems don’t stand on their own but that they have more to say in conversation with each other as they circle shared concerns.

What words themselves circle is a main thread of the book, starting with the title, a nod to the ancient Greek philosopher Democritus’s theory of atomism, under which all matter is made up of immutable atoms and infinite void and life takes shape from the tension between the two. Words function like atoms in the book, carting complicated histories as they configure and reconfigure across the pages—a point Fagan underscores in his frequent use of Greek-rooted words. “Words are atoms beaten by myriad uses and abuses,” he writes in “Asteriskos,” a typically knotty meditation on experience and language. The poem’s speaker asks a personified presence of death to “beautify the plural” so that the gaps among words can be “rinsed of the workaday / Symbols and the impermeable occlusions of power.” The poem “Aporia”—the Greek word for impasse—more directly takes on the contradictory power and limitation of words. The speaker makes words complicit in his self-alienation as he doubts his own heart. Momentum-building anaphora of the phrase “my heart” builds to a telling end:

With inexplicable,

Invisible delicacy—

I was driven out here

To forget by a long

And careful mythology.

Words, like atoms, are the impetus of experience, and Fagan continually wrestles with what they reveal and what they obscure. 

The experience of reading the book can feel heavy, weighed by deep thought, layered syntax, and dark moods. Proclamations like “Everything worthwhile / Ends just before it was scheduled to begin” in the poem “Petals of Fire” and “I no longer know what it is to love and be loved” in “Exploded View”  read as impossibly bleak. But other poems provide some lift, especially those that put Fagan’s twisted humor and cinematic eye on display. “The Zebra Lounge” drops the reader into a vivid bar scene where “Debbie the bartender is drunk and showing off / The lamb-shaped pound cake she made for Easter,” and Tommy, the piano player, “only plays / The opening chords of ‘Bennie and the Jets’ and stops, / Which never fails to piss people off.” The surrealist poem “Pepper’s Ghost” references the hologram-like optical illusion of the same name to show nonsensical snippets of domestic life (a man putting an egg on his wife’s side of the bed, another smelling the inside of his shoe as a “Muzak^® version of ‘Eleanor Rigby’ plays overhead).” Meanwhile, “A Beginner’s Guide to Invisibility” comes with an intricately macabre and fantastical set of instructions, beginning with the burial of a “severed head,” but ends with the ironically simple advice, “You’ll know you’ve turned invisible when you turn invisible.”

If, as Atom and Void explores its preponderance of ideas, it often does so with a sense of detachment, there’s good reason. The book speaks to the multiplicity of experience and the difficulty inherent in describing it. “I try to face the world as it is / And not as I would have it be,” Fagan writes in the poem “The Passenger,” a meditation on the nature of suffering. He closes the poem on a vulnerable note: “. . . but there’s nothing / Like hearing a person sing . . . I have to put something down to let it go.” Listening with a finely tuned antenna, Fagan hears the push and pull of words and gives them space to move in their ever-widening orbit.

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Melissa Shepherd is an MFA candidate in poetry at the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University. She lives and writes in the big little city of Hoboken, New Jersey, where she also advocates for the performing arts and paints large-scale acrylics. She is a diehard fan of her husband, her two teenagers, David Bowie, cold-brew coffee, and NPR.