Bad Behavior

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)