Just About Anything: New and Selected Poems

by Jonathan Aaron

128 pages, Paperback

Published March 21, 2025

About the author

Jonathan Aaron lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is the author of three collections of poetry. His work has received many honors, including fellowships from Yaddo and MacDowell. His poems, essays, and reviews have been widely published in periodicals including The Paris Review and The New York Review of Books and his poems have appeared five times in The Best American Poetry.

Reviews

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this collection, the poems smack of sardonic wit, suggesting that life is just a big joke. Perhaps it is, but then again, it could be just about anything—or nothing. Some poems read like word puzzles for academics and the intelligentsia: “Aphorisms for the eye / framed in snatches of an exploded grammar” (p. 87). Yet the poet also reveals his genius in poems like “Van Gogh and the Wind,” which is its own masterpiece, and “The Heart,” which perhaps reveals the secret of everything.


ASHES

They took only a few seconds to pour
from the shiny container into a hole in the ground,

but after all it wasn’t you anymore, you were
past the borders of algebra and helium, past

where the universe comes to an end and then continues
as nothing—nothing

and everything. (p. 74)


Favorite Poems:
“Arnold”
“Baltic Rain”
“Ashes”
“Looking at the Moon”
“Kurt Schwitters’s Real Name”
“Disappearances”
“Van Gogh and the Wind”
“Destination”
“The Heart”