Streetfighting
"These poems are sudden and powerful and they leave the reader haunted,
affected, looking back down the long train tunnel of youth, wondering how we got
to be where we are, wondering if this is the light, and how did we ever make it
here."
-- Hollins Critic
Streetfighting is a racy, sobering book about the vicissitudes of an urban childhood. Every poem has the ring of authenticity--the observed, the suffered, the
mourned--but only because the language of every poem is wound tight as a fist. The poems tell everything, but they explain nothing: they revel in the weird inexplicability of the most ordinary human lives. Even the darkest poems feel joyous, buoyed by the energy of their language: read the first poem, and you won't be able to stop--you'll swallow the whole, and the final poem will change you.-- James Longenbach
The Irish boys hanging out on the corner with their DA hairdos and smart-aleck talk. Hitching rides under the bumpers of trucks, the corner bars, the fights, the boys that ended up in jail--the whole grimy, rich, stick-ball scene brought back in a rush. (Only for me it was the Brooklyn Dodgers instead of the Phillies.) Donaghy has recreated not only a childhood and a family, but a whole neighborhood and a way of life replete with its grim realities and terrible beauties. -- Alice Friman
In Streetfighting Dan Donaghy writes about a gritty urban environment, and
what in a lesser talent would have been simply depressing, a mother smearing her son’s face with a crushed lightning bug, or a boy falling from a high catwalk, “so quietly/no one else knew he was gone,” we find instead small acts of courage and compassion, even a kind of grace achieved while playing basketball and street baseball, and most importantly a coming-to-terms with the past, with parents, with wrongs committed. Donaghy has more than enough talent and wisdom to pull it off in this brilliant debut collection. -- Harry Humes
Consistently throughout this very fine first book of poems is a precision of diction and an almost impeccable care for words that has the power to lift these poems, and the lives that inhabit them, somehow off of the page, and then deep into our brains. I like too the unusual and engaging angle of vision of these poems, a lingering a seductive kind of observation characterized most accurately by Mr. Donaghy's owns words: “Often we cannot read the gesture/until the figure becomes background.” This is an ambitious, witty and, thanks to its deep and abiding sense of irony, a highly entertaining book that is a true joy to read. -- Bruce Weigl
Daniel Donaghy holds a B.A. from Kutztown University, an M.A. from Hollins College, and an M.F.A. in creative writing (poetry) from Cornell University. He is currently completing a Ph.D. in English from the University of Rochester. His poems have appeared in New Letters, The Southern Review, Poet Lore, Cimarron Review, Texas Review, Commonweal, Image, West Branch, and other journals. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, and the Cornell Council for the Arts. He lives in Spencerport, New York, with his wife and daughter.
