The Animal of Existence by Jared Daniel Fagen
"Language is a dangerous burning woods. ‘What's at stake is thus far what survives the inferno’. And in those hot thickets, The Animal of Existence by Jared Daniel Fagen is itself a complex animal — crouching, questioning, restless, at times stalking the edges of consciousness, at times wild of mouth, with an electric charged bite. It offers a series of poetic prose texts, hybrid in their inventive logics of narrative and syntax, each piece carrying distinct music and texture. ‘I am walled and rung alive by your love, your love annihilated me from the territory of circumferences, of your retina.’
This book powerfully wrangles alienation and identity as well as grief, hard feelings, and ‘the mourning dusk of us’. The angles are vividly torqued and they touch the delicate nerves. ‘Say I a wound instead.’" — Sawako Nakayasu
"Language is a dangerous burning woods. ‘What's at stake is thus far what survives the inferno’. And in those hot thickets, The Animal of Existence by Jared Daniel Fagen is itself a complex animal — crouching, questioning, restless, at times stalking the edges of consciousness, at times wild of mouth, with an electric charged bite. It offers a series of poetic prose texts, hybrid in their inventive logics of narrative and syntax, each piece carrying distinct music and texture. ‘I am walled and rung alive by your love, your love annihilated me from the territory of circumferences, of your retina.’
This book powerfully wrangles alienation and identity as well as grief, hard feelings, and ‘the mourning dusk of us’. The angles are vividly torqued and they touch the delicate nerves. ‘Say I a wound instead.’" — Sawako Nakayasu
"Language is a dangerous burning woods. ‘What's at stake is thus far what survives the inferno’. And in those hot thickets, The Animal of Existence by Jared Daniel Fagen is itself a complex animal — crouching, questioning, restless, at times stalking the edges of consciousness, at times wild of mouth, with an electric charged bite. It offers a series of poetic prose texts, hybrid in their inventive logics of narrative and syntax, each piece carrying distinct music and texture. ‘I am walled and rung alive by your love, your love annihilated me from the territory of circumferences, of your retina.’
This book powerfully wrangles alienation and identity as well as grief, hard feelings, and ‘the mourning dusk of us’. The angles are vividly torqued and they touch the delicate nerves. ‘Say I a wound instead.’" — Sawako Nakayasu
About the Author
Jared Daniel Fagen is a Korean-American writer. His prose poems, essays and conversations have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Fence, Lana Turner, and Asympote, among other publications. He is the editor and publisher of Black Sun Lit, a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative literature at the CUNY Graduate Center, and an adjunct lecturer at the City College of New York. Born in Jeollanam-do, he lives in Brooklyn and the western Catskills. The Animal of Exisitance is his first book.
Reviews
“In these epistemological bulletins, where the end is found to be endless and the image is the debt of the animal's awareness Fagen drives the apple of articulate injury with "molten" address and hallucenatory panic.” — Carlos Lara