Steve Langan • Notes on Exile & Other Poems

• The Weldon Kees Award 2004 •

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.
   • Greg Kuzma - Author of Good News

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 fragmented, desperate, and soulful American poetic voice on the cusp of the twenty-first century.
   • Nicky Beer - Prairie Schooner

About the Author:

Steve Langan is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he received the Paul Engle Postgraduate Fellowship from the James Michener Foundation. He is currently on the teaching and residency faculty of the University of Nebraska MFA in Writing program.