You Must Remember This
Poems
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
“Hauntingly fable-like and delightfully idiosyncratic.” —ADA LIMÓN
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bazzett, a Minneapolis high school teacher, delivers a debut collection whose mercurial sensibility and loose-woven free verse place him somewhere between Robert Hass and Patricia Lockwood. His pages stand out, amid so many other mildly quirky or eccentric first books, because their verse comes closer than most to presenting real people in his imagined world. Strange events part charm, part menace take place throughout: postapocalyptic humans believe that "the point of existence/ was to gather things in concentric rings"; a couple decide to "settle their divorce in mime court"; clouds "made of human/ limbs and torsos" rain blood; a very old blind man predicts that "you will one day befriend an orangutan," though when the orangutan shows up (in another poem) he turns out to be a robot who fathers an interspecies child. Fears of death and delightful velleities, intermittent distractions and persistent adulthood follow the poet around his sometimes cartoony world, where the mere sight of a "prison for the insane" prompts dreams of destructive rampages and ghostly escapes. Like Hass, he can veer into a confessional mode and then pull knowingly out. Yet his collection is never slowed down by self-consciousness: instead, it's entertaining in its sadness, off-kilter, and defiantly hard to explain.
