Synopses & Reviews
A woozy logic dominates these poems: a heart can become a buzzing hive of bees, a rooster can trigger a series of bombs, a young man can embrace a city bus as his spirit animal. Yet Bazzett slices through his poems with a dangerous sense of humor. Your humor is deft and cutting / my fingers off one by one,” as one poem puts it. Once dismembered, Bazzetts poems can re-member us and piece together the ways in which we once thought we knew ourselves, creating a new, strange sense of self.
A meditation on who we are, who weve been, and what we might become, Bazzetts writing is like a note written in invisible ink: partially what we see on the page, but also but also the many dozen doorways that we dont walk through each day.” You Must Remember This is a consistently slippery, enrapturing collection of poems.
Review
You Must Remember This is a book of unnerving wonders, one in which improbable events are narrated with strange intimacy, lucidity, and sly wit. Bazzett may be channeling a bit of Jorge Luis Borges, Charles Simic, Steven Millhauser, and Phillip K. Dick but he is also a writer unlike anyone else at work in America.” Kevin Prufer
Synopsis
"Hauntingly fable-like and delightfully idiosyncratic." --ADA LIM N
A woozy logic dominates these poems: a heart can become a buzzing hive of bees, a rooster can trigger a series of bombs, a young man can embrace a city bus as his spirit animal. Yet in this collection--selected by Kevin Prufer as the winner of the 2014 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry--Michael Bazzett slices through his poems with a dangerous sense of humor. "Your humor is deft and cutting / my fingers off one by one." Once dismembered, Bazzett's poems can re-member us and piece together the ways in which we once thought we knew ourselves, creating a new, strange sense of self.
A meditation on who we are, who we've been, and what we might become, Bazzett's writing is like a note written in invisible ink: partially what we see on the page, but also the "many dozen doorways that we don't walk through each day." You Must Remember This is a consistently slippery, enrapturing collection of poems.
About the Author
Michael Bazzetts poems have appeared in
Ploughshares,
Massachusetts Review,
Pleiades, and
Best New Poets. He is the author of two chapbooks of poetry and the winner of the Bechtel Prize from Teachers and Writers Collaborative. Michael lives in Minneapolis with his wife and two children.
You Must Remember This is his debut full-length collection.