Heart Murmur/ Soffio Al Cuore

The poems of Heart Murmer are richly talky and utterly authentic, one moment wry and self-deprecating and the next astonishingly open-hearted. I honor this book for its celebration of our foolish hopes, our crazed and enlivening appetites.---Nancy Eimers

Heart Murmer is an electric storm of language running a gauntlet of feeling from grief to gallows humor that left me astonished. Steffen burns the solipsistic personal at the stake---Roger Weingarten

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 eatch our breaths.---Sydney Lea

Michael Lasorsa Steifen is the author of one previous collection of poems, No Good at Sea (Legible Press, 2002). His manuscripts have been shortlisted for several national book contests, and his poems and critical prose have appeared in a wide variety of journals, including Poetry. Polomac Review. The Ledge, Poet Low. Rluno, and many others
Paolo Ruffilli studied modern literature at the University of Bologna. After a period of teaching, he became editor with the publisher Garzanti in Milan, and is presently the general editor of the Edizioni del Leone in Venice. He has published numerous volumes of poetry, the more recent being: Piecola colazione (1987, American Poetry Prize), Diario di Normandia (1990. Montale Prize), Camera oseunt (1992), La gioia eil lutto (2001, Prix Europeen, in English translation Joy and Mounting. Dedalus Press 2004). He has also published the story books Preparativi per la partenza (2003) and Un'altna vita (2009)