BORDIGHERA POETRY PRIZE [ 11 sponsored by THE SOnIA RAIZISS-GIOP CHARITABlE FOunDATIOn The poems of Heart Murmur 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 catch our breaths. - Sydney Lea