You Must Remember This

Poems

Michael Bazzett

• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781571314741
• eBook ISBN: 9781571319302
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

"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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• After Machado
• I
• II
• III
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author