Michael Bazzett (Poetry, Fiction, Translation) | Minneapolis, MN

Michael Bazzett’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Massachusetts Review, The Sun, 32 Poems, Oxford Poetry and Best New Poets. He is the author of the chapbooks, The Imaginary City (Organic Weapon Arts, 2012) and The Unspoken Jokebook, forthcoming from Organic Weapon. His debut collection, You Must Remember This, (Milkweed Editions, 2014) won the Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, and his verse translation of the Mayan creation epic, The Popol Vuh, is forthcoming from Milkweed in 2017. He lives in Minneapolis, with his wife and two children.

Books

Press & Reviews

Bazzett delivers a debut whose mercurial sensibility & loose-woven free verse place him somewhere between Robert Hass & 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–abound, and like Hass, he can veer into a confessional mode & then pull knowingly out. Yet his collection is never slowed by self-consciousness: instead, it’s entertaining in its sadness, off-kilter, & defiantly hard to explain.
—Publishers Weekly

Frightening, hilarious, and dark, 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

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