You must remember this : poems

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Title:

You must remember this : poems

Author:

Bazzett, Michael

Uniform Title:

Poems. Selections

ISBN:

9781571314741

Edition:

First edition.

Physical Description:

86 pages ; 22 cm

Subject Term:

American poetry -- 21st century.

Holds:

Available:*

Library	Call Number	Status
Searching... Hardwood Creek Library (Forest Lake)	811.6 BAZ	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Park Grove Library (Cottage Grove)	811.6 BAZ	Searching... Unknown
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury)	811.6 BAZ	Searching... Unknown

Summary

"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.

Author Notes

Michael Bazzett's 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 & Writers Collaborative. Michael lives in Minneapolis with his wife and two children. You Must Remember This is his debut full-length collection.

Reviews (1)

Publisher's Weekly Review

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. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

After Machado	p. 3
I In Vladivostok	p. 7
Cyclops	p. 8
The Field Beyond the Wall	p. 10
Memory	p. 11
Soirée	p. 14
When They Meet, They Can't Help It	p. 15
Clockwatcher	p. 17
Atlas	p. 18
The Difficulty of Holding Time	p. 20
The Same Bones	p. 21
Some Party	p. 23
The Building	p. 25
The Sinclair Gift Emporium	p. 30
Rather Than Read Another Word	p. 32
The Last Expedition	p. 33
Holder Strand	p. 35
II Oil and Ash	p. 39
Look, he said, and pointed	p. 40
Aria	p. 42
from A Natural History of Silence	p. 43
Unspoken	p. 46
From Chaos	p. 47
What Might	p. 49
September Picnic	p. 51
Interrogation	p. 53
Lions	p. 54
A Woman Stands in a Field	p. 56
The Crisis	p. 57
Elpenor	p. 58
Look, Overlook	p. 59
III The Dark Thing	p. 63
The Book of ___	p. 64
Nuns	p. 66
The Shop Across the Street	p. 67
The People Who Came Afterward	p. 68
The Professional	p. 69
Imperfection	p. 71
The Horse	p. 72
Now Here, Nowhere	p. 73
In the Pasture Corner	p. 75
How It Survived for a While	p. 76
The School	p. 77
The Orangutan	p. 78
Manhood	p. 79
Foretold	p. 81
Binary	p. 82
Recollection	p. 84
The Last Time I Saw God	p. 86

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Reviews (1)

Publisher's Weekly Review

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