Brick Road Poetry Press is pleased to announce that Michael Steffen of Lancaster, NY has been awarded the 2011 Brick Road Poetry Award for his manuscript, Bad Behavior. In addition to the book being published (in summer 2012), Michael Steffen has been awarded $1000. Two other finalists were Carol Tyx of Iowa City and Susanna Lang of Chicago, IL. Tyx’s book, Rising to the Rim, and Lang’s book, Tracing the Lines, will also be published by Brick Road Poetry Press in 2012.
Michael Steffen’s poetry is described as “. . . an electric storm of language running a gauntlet of feeling from grief to gallows humor” (Roger Weingarten). His poems, both personal and communal, are linked to the broader world through a style that is “. . . one moment wry and self-deprecating and the next astonishingly open-hearted” (Nancy Eimers).
The overarching theme of Michael Steffen’s Bad Behavior is human imperfection and our response to it, or lack of response, as the poem “First Things First” illustrates:
First Things First
No wonder our parents were so intent
on teaching us what to do when
the phone’s ringing, someone’s at the door,
our hand is on a hot stove,
and we need to go to the bathroom—
to be absolutely certain, as adults,
in that baffling shuffle of choices,
where to begin, and why.
You’d think it would be obvious
in the echelon of things to do,
but someone at some point
dragged a cart from a barn
and placed his horse behind it—
the earliest failure of common sense—
man and beast standing in rain,
puzzling over their lack of movement.
Bad Behavior is an insightfully witty study of the poor choices we sometimes make, of what happens when things go wrong and we find ourselves in the same situation as the creature in the closing poem—“unaware of its own tenuous survival,/of the perils that menaced it on all sides” (from “The Hermit Crab”).
~~~
About Michael Steffen
Michael Steffen is the author of two previous poetry collections—No Good at Sea (Legible Press, 2002) and Heart Murmur (Bordighera Press, 2009). His poems have appeared in a wide variety of journals including Poetry, Potomac Review, The Ledge, Poet Lore, Rhino and many other journals. In 2002, Michael was granted a Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. He is a Y2K graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Vermont College and currently lives in Lancaster, NY.
If you would like more information about this topic, or to schedule an interview with Michael Steffen, please contact Ron Self at (706) 649-3080 or email Ron at
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
News
