Steffen’s wonderfully companionable poems range from belly-laugh-worthy to gut-wrenching, from shocking to tender, to witty to blackly humorous and back.  His Ripley’s Odditorium of characters are each the speaker—and us—stumbling through our lives’ ordinary terrors and beauties, into and through the everyday truths we comprehend only briefly as the great ones—doomed to relearn them as our “fingers point to every possible desire,” and all too oblivious in our accidental wisdom, to all we already have.

—April Ossmann, author of Anxious Music (Four Way Books, 2007)

These poems are elegiac yet irreverent, elegant yet unflinching in their deliverance of searing emotional truth—an apt juxtaposition in these ruinous times.  A palpable will undergirds this language.  The speaker is as much a force of nature sent forth to confront the conundrum of our common predicament, as he is a fallible, recognizable human struggling with the smallest details of existence.  Bad Behavior is a deeply engaging, enjoyable collection.

—Pam Bernard, author of Blood Garden:  An Elegy for Raymond (WordTech Communications, 2010)

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)