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Langan expertly positions his poems right on the cusp between comprehension and confusion, in that wonderfully liminal state of discovery. Though the poems are
often sad, as well as sly, funny, worrisome, and unlikely, this book keeps the mind happy by giving it again and again the charge it needs to create the
experience of newness. — Catie Rosemurgy
“What am I listening for?” Steve Langan writes. “The lyric of damages, with slivers of lightning.” But he is very aware of himself as a maker of poems, and of
poems as forms of inherited, though not necessarily genuine, feeling. His impulse is to interrogate the uses of language, to probe, often comically, at the
consciousness of art, revealing what is essential. It's this rejection of a received sense of value that intrigues me about his work, the feeling that he is
trying to clarify how poems can move and act if they are to truly speak for us. — Bob Hicok
I'm consistently jealous of Steve Langan's small-a absurdist accuracy, not to mention his unfailing ability to dredge gorgeous song from the hum of the normal.
Meet Me at the Happy Bar is sharp, sad, sassy, and frighteningly alive. — Graham Foust
Langan’s got this stuff down cold in the brightest possible way; the man uses words like a tinkerer delighting in some strange attic, stuccoing his lines with
toothsome phrases enough to make the poems almost feel like meals (”How mere “pilfering” may play / under the kleig lights. // Petty theft.”).
What makes Langan’s Meet Me at the Happy Bar stand so far out from other collections is not just the whirligig zip and whiplash he causes by putting
disparate lines next to and on top of each other (”The answer is deer at the salt lick. / What I mean is rare coins and stamps.”), nor the ache for some
substantial meaning to bedazzle all this flotsam onto, some foundation to leave the heaps upon. No, what makes this all such a big deal is the explicit emphasis
of now, of time.
Langan’s poetry throughout shines — sweats, even — with a desperate awareness that time is critical, is passing. His poems acknowledge that, yes,
meaning and understanding and sense are all critical and to-be-reached-for things, but instead of taking a sort of beard-stroking well, let’s see attitude,
his poems damn near vibrate with urgency. — Make Magazine
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In Notes on Exile Langan breaks the stranglehold of the reasonable, leaps out the window of his submarine onto
"a brickledge crumbling" — seeking always untenable positions and indecipherable causes. Reading him we
realize how much our thinking has been circumscribed, foundationed, and edified — and how desperate we are for
what is forced, abandoned and untamed. ... There is a burden of freedom in this book which approaches the absolute. —
from the introduction by Greg Kuzma
Though the landscapes of the poems are distinctly interior and psychological, one cannot help but read
this interior as a uniquely American one. Much of the anomie and anxiety in Notes on Exile & Other Poems seems to be
the product of a culture where rapture is trivialized by its proximity with the quotidian, and language is often a
treacherous, euphemistic subterfuge. ... Langan is clearly developing his considerable gift to elegize the framgmented,
desperate, and soulful American poetic voice on the cusp of the twenty-first century. — Prairie Schooner
I like the poems a lot: aphoristic, dream-like, with a gentle urgency and "humorous sadness." — Cahiers de
Corey
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Steve Langan's brilliant first book is full of passion suffused with irony,
poems cagily built to deconstruct sentimentality by using self-consciousness
as a kind of comic foil. But for all the poet's clever feints and evasions,
at the core of the work beats the heart of a romantic. Langan's methods
are luminously impressionistic, and the poems percolate with image and
materiality, inflection and the full-throated music of language. Freezing
glitters with the distant light (or explosions of inner light) of a hundred
small moments colliding where perception meets the self in the "unbeautiful
city." — from the jacket
There is something brave and unremitting in these beautifully realized
testaments to the unbeautiful city, these dark hymns to the republic, the
industrial heartland. I rejoice in this act of poetic warming, in the way
Steve Langan has taken a landscape of emotional destitution and transformed
it into the sure incantatory cadences of art. — Edward Hirsch
After great pain, an informal feeling comes and these funny, wise, casually
urgent poems are here to bear witness. Here is a new voice out of the
prairie but its ancestors go way back to awe, to the beginning. — Carol Muske
These are tough, gritty, and beautiful poems. Be aware of this, reader:
Freezing will set you on fire! — Thomas Lux
In Langan's debut collection, Freezing, the poet struggles in tightly
focused poems of process and meditative excursion into the declining
Midwestern city to find some justification and sense of well-being in
his own violent and "unbeautiful city." The result is an always
accurate, often sublime, ultimately optimistic body of poems. ...
Freezing unsettles and captivates, comforts and dissects,
despairs and rejoices. In stark and unrelenting language, Langan
imbues his landscape with a palette that extends well beyond the
traditional grays of the industrial Midwest. He encourages us to
be full of rancor, vision, and passion with poems that more than
invite, insist that we "go out into the noise." — Black
Warrior Review
Freezing is an impressive performance, both in many of its individual
poems and its architectonics, its deft mingling of private and imagined other
selves. — American Book Review
Nothing could be worse for a poet than to be termed "sentimental"
— the specter of
Hallmark looming in the shadows — but as Richard Hugo famously advised,
poets must risk sentimentality in order to approach good poetry.
Steve Langan takes this risk in his first collection, Freezing,
and time and again the bet pays off.
Langan’s desolate Midwest landscapes and off-the-chart emotional IQ
inevitably bring Hugo to mind. ...
With both Hugo and Langan, the prospect of good poetry in
these terminally John Wayne situations seems slim to none,
making their prodigious poetic accomplishments all the more
astonishing. Far from the helpless victim of these prairie
vagrancies, as Hugo often portrays himself, Langan remains
firmly in control of the universe of his poems,
absorbing their images and creating his own peculiar mythology.
—
Jacket Magazine,
#19, October 2002/Verse, October 2002
In Freezing, there is a constant friction with reality; it is not borne
out of some arbitrary antagonism, but out of an abiding need for something sacred, and
out of Langan's maddening certainty that the sacred resides somewhere, in the outreaches of the
unbeautiful city and the unbeautiful self. — Indiana Review
Langan's first book is a startling collection of poems about the unbeautiful and the
abandoned. ... Langan's poems are about risk, about the dangerous maneuvering required
to drive home
in the middle lane. This is the middle lane between praise and complaint. It is the
unadorned rendering of life,
a tough honesty, that makes the journey worth while; by refusing to
make life into legend, Langan writes poems that are relevant to anyone fortunate
enough to pick up this book.
... readers, Freezing must be experienced! — Virginia Quarterly Review
["The Black Pants"] series is sucessful in part because of Langan's comic
timing, the patterns of pauses and phrases, the short, declarative
sentences. But it is also successful because of his awareness that not
only would no one else believe this is a simple set of poems about an
object, he wouldn't believe it either. To claim so would be even more
ludicrous than Frost claiming that the two roads that diverge in a yellow
wood were merely literal paths he once came across while walking. Writers
of his generation do play games — many of them — but not those which
underestimate their own or their readers' savvy. — Green Mountains Review
Growing up in the Midwest, I heard records from Husker Du, the Replacements, Uncle Tupelo
and other heartland bands in a particular way, in a way that taught me (for better and for
worse) how to live — and how not to live — in my given surroundings, as well as
how to love those surroundings even when I loathed them. Lately, the hard, dark poems in
Freezing, a book largely set in Omaha, Nebraska (or someplace very much like it), have
been doing the same thing for me that those records once did.
— Graham Foust, Third Factory
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What the Critics Say
