"Michael Stephens was my Dante into dark and dangerous places that native Irish writers never knew. Mr. Stephens, sardonic, witty, places his characters in the path of an oncoming future that seems to offer little hope though you know in the end they'll prevail."
Frank McCourt, author of Angela's Ashes
"This beautiful, cruel book--classical in form, Celtic in language, Brooklyn-American in content--is Michael Stephens's best book and may well be a masterpiece. It's like a pit bull on a chain, and you can lose a hand if you try to pet it. Read it carefully, warily."
Russell Banks, author of Affliction and Continental Drift
"...witty, thoughtful, and absorbingly readable, as well as an important study of urban violence."
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Angry, funny and tender, rather than grim, Stephens is a poet of the negative, the failed, the shameful, who can match Samuel Beckett for dour comedy and Joyce for the lyric lilt. In five long chapters of increasing power, Stephens dismantles the American dream."
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Lyric, urgent, stunning-Michael Stephens has written a eulogy to a time and place, East New York, and to a people-the Irish of Brooklyn who will live on in this book of the dead."
Maureen Howard, author of Natural History
"Lesser novelists faced with this array of characters would be content with merely depicting the decay of familial relationships. Mr. Stephens weaves them into a poem that soars. Out of remarkable bits and pieces-the interior monologues, the vivid scatological imagery, the impressionistic dialogue-there emerges a Coole gestalt that is far more than the sum of its sad ingredients."
New York Times Sunday Book Review
"It is a joy to read because Michael Stephens is such a superb writer, a master of language, in short, a poet. In his immaculate artistry he has given us another way of perceiving our lives and our struggle, forcing us to ask ourselves what our legacy will be."
Hubert Selby Jr., author of Last Exit to Brooklyn
"Stephens has written about the Cooles before, and perhaps he will do so again, continuing to supply a necessary if nasty corrective to one of the myths of the moment. In a strange way his grimness nearly makes this book a political statement."
Bill McKibben, Hungry Mind Review