You Must Remember This - by Michael Bazzett (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"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.

Review Quotes

"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

About the Author

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.