The 102 poems of Morning Bafflement and Timeless Puzzlement continue the dialogue with and a questioning of the human condition as they hover above what the author sees as the absurd, the existential, and otherworldly elements of life, the ordinary and the extraordinary spheres of being, that J. J. Steinfeld embarked upon in his previous Ekstasis Editions poetry collection, A Visit to the Kafka Café (2018). These poems once again attempt to make sense out the way we conduct our lives, to find meaning in our not always meaningful surroundings, to look at individuals caught in the sometimes joyous, sometimes frightening, yet endlessly fascinating moments of existence and being.

Morning Bafflement and Timeless Puzzlement moves through poems where questions are answers and answers are questions, in which J. J. Steinfeld reveals the ironies that lurk in sacred games. It is all theatre of the absurd, liturgies for sex, death, games played inside the proscenium arch, where actors are audience and audience are actors waiting for Godot, the ineffable mystery to reveal itself.
~ Linda Rogers, author of Repairing the Hive and editor of Mother, a Verb

Steinfeld is Canada’s great curator of the luckless: B-movie actors, broken-hearted cartographers, unsuccessful job applicants, and no shortage of reclusive superheroes, still battling old monsters in their heads—all these and more haunt their way through this defiant new collection. And while there is bafflement here, as the book’s title suggests, there’s also the mature voice of a writer who has spent his career confronting the worst of what humanity has to offer, only to return to his readers with humour and an unshakeable belief in the redemptive powers of putting it all to the page.
~ David Hickey, author of Open Air Bindery and In the Lights of a Midnight Plow

Fiction writer, poet, and playwright J. J. Steinfeld lives on Prince Edward Island, where he is patiently waiting for Godot’s arrival and a phone call from Kafka. While waiting, he has published twenty-one books: two novels, thirteen short story collections, and six poetry collections, along with five chapbooks of poetry and fiction. From 1981, when Steinfeld published his first short story, to the publication of his 2020 Ekstasis Editions poetry collection, nearly 500 of his short stories and more than 1000 poems have appeared in anthologies and periodicals, at least one piece in every Canadian province and internationally in eighteen countries, and over fifty of his one-act plays and a handful of full-length plays have been performed in Canada and the United States.