Michael Steffen's first book-length collection of poems, No Good at Sea, is the winner of the 2001 LEGIBLE open publishing competition. By turns lyrical, intense, cool or self-recriminatory, Steffen's poems display all the virtues of a twentieth-century man living his way into the twenty-first.

No Good at Sea

Steffen, Michael

Legible Books

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, tenuous and aware. -Betsy Sholl, author, most recently, of Rough Cradle (Alice James Books, 2009)

Bad Behavior

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Brick Road Poetry Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Steffen, Michael. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Steffen, Michael

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Steffen, Michael. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

No Good at Sea

Bad Behavior