Reviews of Freezing
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"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

"Langan seems bent on rephrasing the blue-collar verities articulated most forcefully by Philip Levine, which means a constant struggle to transcend intellectual constraints imposed by a lower-middle-class lexicon and its sensibilities without sacrificing the streetwise vigor of his bleak Midwestern scene: 'finding no light in the city's shadows / no celestial light, no beacon, no portent.' . . . Freezing is an impressive performance, both in many of its individual poems and its architectonics, its deft mingling of private and imagined other selves, if not always successful in communicating their tragic dimension or feminine alternatives. At several levels, it manifests the craft assurance of a gifted writer well aware of his and our human foibles and consequent anguish."

–Edward Butcher, The American Book Review, July/August, 2002