The Echo Chamber

Poems

Michael Bazzett

• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781571314932, 9780998246314
• eBook ISBN: 9781571317469
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

From Michael Bazzett, poet and translator of The Popol Vuh, a collection that explores the myth of Echo and Narcissus, offering a reboot, a remix, a reimagining. "Narcissus was never one to see himself // in moving water. // He liked his image / still." In The Echo Chamber, myth is refracted into our current moment. A time traveler teaches a needleworker the pleasures of social media gratification. A man goes looking for his face and is first offered a latex mask. A book reveals eerie transmutations of a simple story. And the myth itself is retold, probing its most provocative qualities—how reflective waters enable self-absorption, the tragic rightness of Echo and Narcissus as a couple. The Echo Chamber examines our endlessly self-referential age of selfies and televised wars and manufactured celebrity, gazing lingeringly into the many kinds of damage it produces, and the truths obscured beneath its polished surface. In the process, Bazzett cements his status as one of our great poetic fools—the comedian who delivers uncomfortable silence, who sheds layers of disguises to reveal light underneath, who smuggles wisdom within "rage-mothered laughter." Late-stage capitalism, history, death itself: all are subject to his wry, tender gaze.By turns searing, compassionate, and darkly humorous, The Echo Chamber creates an echo through time, holding up the broken mirror of myth to our present-day selves.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• History
• I Travel Back in Time
• The Problem
• Movie Night
• Th Campaign
• Hunger
• The Monster in Late Middle Age
• Costume Shop
• Inside the Trojan Horse
• Menu
• The Wall
• What I Did
• The Man on the Screen
• Career Day
• Florida
• Part of the Animal
• I Decided to Invent a Poet
• Echo & Narcissus, Revisited
• Personal
• The Summer Pool
• The Play
• Narcissus
• Things to Think About While Shaving
• Echo Tried to Save Narcissus
• The Trail
• The Anger Artist
• Six Mirrors
• At Fifty
• The Singular Library of Mr. N__________
• Secrets
• Echo
• La Avenida de Santo Narciso
• The Procedure
• This Line Means Nothing
• The Epidemic
• A Stone
• After Mr. and Mrs. God Died,
• Th Comedian
• Acknowledgments