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

 

 

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Steve Langan is the author of a previous collection of poems, Freezing . He lives in Omaha and on an island off the coast of Maine.