|
 |
|
|
 |
No Good at Sea
ISBN: 0-9715145-0-X (softcover) $10.00. Purchase from author.
Like the Friday night he writes about, Mike Steffen's poems are exhilarating. Through their fluid syntax and rich lexicon, they provide us with a metonymic index of American culture — as sharp as the edge between bitter and sweet.
—Natasha Sajé
________________________________________________________
|
|
|
|
Bad Behavior
ISBN-13: 978-0-9835304-5-9 (softcover) $15.95. Buy through Amazon.com.
or visit www.BrickRoadPoetryPress.com
Bad Behavior catalogs the range and shades of our shared humanity. Michael Steffen's unblinking gaze is often ironic, which makes his capacity for tenderness even more impressive, as he gives voice to a flood-ruined farmer at a pawn shop, or imagines a convict's botched execution, a worker having to listen to himself being fired in corporate double-speak, or shows us a son caring for his ill mother. Steffen imagines the past with its unfixable wrongs "stalking us, bumming cigarettes/wearing holes in its shoes," as if to suggest it is ourselves we give to or refuse. And it is indeed ourselves these poems give back to us, newly tenacious and aware.
—Betsy Sholl |
|
|
Blood Narrative
ISBN: 978-1-59948-846-2 $14 (+ $2 shipping). To order, email the author at msteffen@fastmail.fm.
Michael Steffen’s keen, penetrating wit is not only deeply satisfying, but offers succor in an era when there’s little stomach for whimsy. But these poems offer much more. Scope and intimacy define this latest collection, and it begins right off with “Moths,” the first poem. This gentle but prescient lyric offers a blessing of sorts for what comes—a journey of unblinking observations and ribald proclivities that reveal a poet whose realization of mortality has shaken loose a kind of hard-won wisdom. We sorely need poets who so fully attend to craft and to the honest resurrection of lived life.
—Pam Bernard (author of three poetry collections, and of Esther, a novel in verse) |
|
|
|
