Atom and Void by Aaron Fagan
Atom and Void begins with the poem “We Who Are About to Die Salute You,” which begins with the line: “For starters, my ignorance is what resents what outlasts me.” Riffing on ancient Roman literature, the title (along with others like “At Capacity” or “The Last Night of the World”) suggests a sense of imminent collapse, empire’s fall, or even of being at the end of the human project. (Interestingly, Atom and Void is the title of a book of essays, also published by Princeton University Press, by Oppenheimer—a key figure in hastening that end.) Heard in this context, the resentment—which I read more so as disaffection —of the poem’s first line could be read as virtuous, since the ultimate legacy of “what outlasts me,” from Ancient Rome to the atomic bomb, is violence. Except that Fagan, while persistently stressing the fallenness of humanity and the fallibility of knowledge, still declares knowledge to be his “ultimate end.” The knowledg...