Daniel Donaghy was raised in Philadelphia and is the author of Streetfighting, a Paterson Poetry Prize finalist. He is assistant professor of English at Eastern Connecticut State University and has received artist grants from the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation.

Books by Daniel Donaghy:

Other poems on the web by Daniel Donaghy:
"Landscape with Bikers"
"Felix and the School Desk"
Five poems

About Start with the Trouble:

"Start with the Trouble is a memory-haunted book. Returning to the mean streets of Philadelphia, to an ‘El-darkened neighborhood,’ Donaghy tells stories of fathers home from aching labor, of kids who quit school, get in fights or accidents, drift off, or disappear. In the end, this is a hymn to lives that don’t flower, shot through with loss and, finally, redemption."
—Kim Addonizio

"Donaghy takes us to a corner of the City of Hope where hope ‘such a simple word’ exists as a complex illusion amidst the city’s everyday cruelties. You won’t find this corner on any tourist map. Here, survival is the only monument. While many of these poems look back, it is not with nostalgia but with desperation to preserve those who have been lost. These poems exist because they have no choice. . . . Donaghy is the real deal. He’s not striking any poses or doing any fancy dances. These poems grab you by the collar and compel you to listen."
—Jim Daniels

"Dan Donaghy could have been a stonecutter, but he chose to work something harder. Amazing, in these finely sculpted poems, how beautiful trouble and loss and pain can be, how excruciatingly pleasureable. We begin, and so often end, in trouble, a fact these poems do not deny. But, still, Donaghy tells us, trouble is not all we have."
—Jake Adam York

"Poem after poem offers the consolation of a thoughtful human spirit who struggles with the blackness and is not broken. Never peripheral to human experience, Donaghy’s poems, centered in the heart, teach us to preserve."
—Vivian Shipley