Reviews
"[Coughlin posesses] a strong, versatile, original voice capable of radically different tones and angles of approach. While his poems address their subjects in a generally relaxed, colloquial idiom, they are by no means imprecise. . . I recommend that you watch for more poems by this highly gifted and unpredictable poet."
—Jill Rosser, Pleiades
"Steve Coughlin's Another City is an auspicious debut. These poems—centering on a particular family tragedy—achieve archetypal status through their combination of unflinching observation (and self-observation--including a refreshingly honest picture of the poet as adolescent) and vast, almost irrational sympathy for an imperfect family that could just as easily have been yours or mine. At once amusing and heartbreaking, this book is so consistently lively and alive I found it impossible to put down."
—Lloyd Schwartz, author of Cairo Traffic
"A few years ago, I happened upon a poem called "For the El Camino." That poem did to me what Chapman's Homer did to Keats. Since then, anyone who's taken a writing class or a workshop with me . . . has heard me explain in great detail why I think it's one of the finest American odes of the past decade or so. I've been waiting impatiently for a book to go with that ode, to usher it into the world. And with appearance of Another City, Steve Coughlin's lovely, tender beauty of a book, I'm happy to say my wait is over."
—George Bilgere, author of Imperial
"Many good poets can be described as haunted, but Steve Coughlin is more deeply and movingly haunted than most: the core of Another City is his bleakly honest excavation of family memories, in poems whose unflinching, scarred, helplessly loving meditations place Coughlin in the same league with powerful autobiographical poets like Alan Shapiro and Sharon Olds. The drama of Another City is the poet's effort to believe that imagination can change a life in fundamental ways, and the book itself is heartening evidence that it can."
—Mark Halliday, author of Keep This Forever
"Another City's vivid portrayal of family makes these individual poems shine on their own, speak with a quiet fury. Together, linked side by side, they gain even more fury as they combine story and idea to become memoir-in-verse. They grow to an even greater truth. They show us one family, fully flawed, but trying to survive, trying to love each other, trying—even if failing—to create another, less painful life."
--The Green Mountains Review
"The poems in Driving at Twilight are so real with pain and yearning that they become almost surreal, so that as I’m reading and thinking how the work resonates with that of Phil Levine, suddenly I’ve shifted into Mark Strand land. In Coughlin land, the personal becomes the collective to create a liminal space in which the desperation of these lives howls its way into song. I deeply admire this wrenching, urgently human, and beautifully redemptive collection."
—Derek Sheffield, author of Through the Second Skin
—Jill Rosser, Pleiades
"Steve Coughlin's Another City is an auspicious debut. These poems—centering on a particular family tragedy—achieve archetypal status through their combination of unflinching observation (and self-observation--including a refreshingly honest picture of the poet as adolescent) and vast, almost irrational sympathy for an imperfect family that could just as easily have been yours or mine. At once amusing and heartbreaking, this book is so consistently lively and alive I found it impossible to put down."
—Lloyd Schwartz, author of Cairo Traffic
"A few years ago, I happened upon a poem called "For the El Camino." That poem did to me what Chapman's Homer did to Keats. Since then, anyone who's taken a writing class or a workshop with me . . . has heard me explain in great detail why I think it's one of the finest American odes of the past decade or so. I've been waiting impatiently for a book to go with that ode, to usher it into the world. And with appearance of Another City, Steve Coughlin's lovely, tender beauty of a book, I'm happy to say my wait is over."
—George Bilgere, author of Imperial
"Many good poets can be described as haunted, but Steve Coughlin is more deeply and movingly haunted than most: the core of Another City is his bleakly honest excavation of family memories, in poems whose unflinching, scarred, helplessly loving meditations place Coughlin in the same league with powerful autobiographical poets like Alan Shapiro and Sharon Olds. The drama of Another City is the poet's effort to believe that imagination can change a life in fundamental ways, and the book itself is heartening evidence that it can."
—Mark Halliday, author of Keep This Forever
"Another City's vivid portrayal of family makes these individual poems shine on their own, speak with a quiet fury. Together, linked side by side, they gain even more fury as they combine story and idea to become memoir-in-verse. They grow to an even greater truth. They show us one family, fully flawed, but trying to survive, trying to love each other, trying—even if failing—to create another, less painful life."
--The Green Mountains Review
"The poems in Driving at Twilight are so real with pain and yearning that they become almost surreal, so that as I’m reading and thinking how the work resonates with that of Phil Levine, suddenly I’ve shifted into Mark Strand land. In Coughlin land, the personal becomes the collective to create a liminal space in which the desperation of these lives howls its way into song. I deeply admire this wrenching, urgently human, and beautifully redemptive collection."
—Derek Sheffield, author of Through the Second Skin
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