Award-winning poet Michael Steffen comes to Lakewood on 11/7

Award-winning poet Michael Steffen will be featured in a reading/book signing at The Bookshop in Lakewood, 15230 Madison Avenue, Lakewood, OH  44107 on Sunday, November 7^th, 2021 from 2-5 pm.  Michael will read at 4 pm from his recently-published collection, Blood Narrative (Main Street Rag Press, 2021). 

Praise for Michael Steffen’s Poetry

These warm, generous, and lively poems speak to the narrative of body and spirit, of family, marriage, community and culture, as they come to terms with past and present losses. They do it best by living in the present, grateful for the whole of every moment—luscious, embarrassing, lonely, or loving, reveling in the sensual. Steffen’s capacity to surprise with sudden humor or beauty or truth infuses every poem, reminding us to live fully, because “somewhere offshore in the eye of apocalypse,/angels raise their trumpets—” as I raise mine, to this wonderful blood narrative.

-     April Ossmann (author of Event Boundaries)

Steffen scrupulously avoids flamboyance, the sort of surface dazzle we find in poems that, like the stereotypical Chinese meal, are immediately appealing but leave us hungry instants later. His plain style approach allows his insights, as it were, to sneak up on us...until we discover ourselves (how did it happen?) in a world so full of pathos that we catch our breaths.

-     Sydney Lea

 About the Author

Michael Steffen is the author of three previous poetry collections: No Good at Sea (Legible Press, 2002) won the Legible Press Poetry Prize.  Heart Murmur (Bordighera Press, 2009) won the Bordighera Poetry Prize, appearing as a bilingual edition in both Italian and English.  His third collection, Bad Behavior (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2012), won the Brick Road Poetry Prize.  While a resident of Pennsylvania, Michael was granted a 2002 Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.  His poems have appeared in Poetry, Potomac Review, Chiron Review, Poet Lore and the American Journal of Poetry among other literary magazines.  He has read and lectured widely and been a mentor in the PEN Prison Writing Program.  Michael is a graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Vermont College and currently lives in Buffalo, New York.

Please go to www.mnsteffen.com for more.