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Michael Bazzett
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You Must Remember This: Poems Kindle Edition

by Michael Bazzett (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.0 out of 5 stars 11 ratings

“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.

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  1. Print length
    106 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Milkweed Editions
  4. Publication date
    November 17, 2014
  5. File size
    2.4 MB
  6. Page Flip
    Enabled
  7. Word Wise
    Not Enabled
  8. Enhanced typesetting
    Enabled
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Editorial Reviews

Review

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

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.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00LRHYAVK
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Milkweed Editions (November 17, 2014)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ November 17, 2014
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 2.4 MB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 106 pages
  • Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 1571314741
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.0 out of 5 stars 11 ratings

About the author

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Michael Bazzett

Michael Bazzett

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Michael Bazzett is the author of five collections of poetry, as well as a verse translation of the creation epic of the Maya, the Popol Vuh (Milkweed Editions, 2018), named by the NY Times as one of the Best Poetry Books of 2018. The recipient of an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, his writing has appeared in Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Threepenny Review, 32 Poems, The Iowa Review, and The Sun. His debut poetry collection, You Must Remember This (Milkweed Editions, 2014), won the Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, followed by his second and third collections, Our Lands Are Not So Different (Horsethief Books) and The Interrogation (Milkweed Editions) in 2017. The Temple, (Bull City Press) was an editors' selection in The Frost Place contest, landing on the SPD bestseller list in the fall of 2020. His latest book, The Echo Chamber, (Milkweed, '21) retells and refracts the myth of Echo & Narcissus, and was featured on NPR's All Things Considered. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife and two children.

To learn more, visit michaelbazzett.com

Customer reviews

4 out of 5 stars
11 global ratings

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Top reviews from the United States

  • Alarie
    5.0 out of 5 stars Just Buy Your Ticket and Get on Bazzett's Bus
    Reviewed in the United States on January 20, 2016
    Verified Purchase
    No one can prepare you for this trip through dreamscapes, dark woods, and the even darker folds of the mind (his or yours?). Don’t despair, you’ll take leaps into humor and joy, too. There will be places you can almost get a footing in the familiar tone of fables, the monsters of fairytales, echoes of other writers (Simic and Atwood for me). However, Bazzett resides in his own parallel universe. It’s best not to question too closely where you’re going. Drink in the wonder, let the atmosphere soak into your skin, and hope he’ll get you back home – just not too soon.

    For me, there was one laugh out loud moment, in “Unspoken”: “Given the unspeakable nature of their differences,/they decided to settle their divorce in mime court.” I was also amused by a brother going out to find his spirit animal and returning to announce, “ 'A bus,' ” he said. 'Huge/as the sperm whale!' "

    My favorite poem, on the softer side of Bazzett’s wild imagination, is “The Sinclair Gift Symposium.” A man returns a pen that doesn’t write and is told, "You see, this particular ink is silent." Maybe the clerk’s toying with him, adlibbing a variation on the Emperor’s New Clothes, but where the poem goes from there is touching.

    You WILL remember this book, but there's enough variety and astounding creativity for each of us to bring back different postcards
    from our trip.
    3 people found this helpful
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  • Jennifer L Pearson
    3.0 out of 5 stars Surrealist poetry--enter at your own risk
    Reviewed in the United States on March 21, 2025
    In the end I found Bazzett's poetry just a little too slippery for me, the surrealism just a touch too dark at times, a touch too dream-like in the sense of not cohering. Our individual dream symbolism has enough personal background and reference, in addition to the universal aspects, that we have handholds for making meaning. I felt like I didn't have enough handholds in some of these poems, especially the earlier ones. I do want to say that the degree of handholds is a totally personal preference on my part. I may need more (or less) than others. That said, Bazzett's poetry still has its charms and many of the poems did successfully navigate the blurry regions of surrealism without me feeling totally awash or groping in the dark.

    I enjoyed the humor, sometimes very subtle, sometimes more direct. One of the quirky aspects of the book that amused me was the repeated appearance of "orangutan." Even though it isn't ever completely decoded as to its special significance to the poet, it was delightful to have it reappear, first as a foiled expectation, then as a subtle self-reference, then as a disappointment.

    Bazzett's poetry is varied free verse. Most of his poems have internal forms they adhere to, those forms vary in line length and number of lines per stanza from poem to poem. The book is divided into three sections. The first contemplates time and identity. The second is pretty much the divorce section with the wonderful "Unspoken" in which "the unspeakable nature of their differences" requires that they settle them in "mime court." Part three further explores moments (again the word "blurry" comes to mind) when things go wrong. Here I can see the dreamlike quality serving the function of underscoring the difficulty of knowing when a line has been crossed and even what the line was.

    Of poets I've read in the past, Russell Edson comes the most to mind as being similar, in part because some of his poems are very visceral. The calm poem "Recollection," a play on words, is a mild example. Here is an excerpt from the beginning:

    Sometimes, after waking,
    I take a moment to collect myself.

    My mind wanders to the cabinet
    where I keep one leg neatly folded,

    held snug by a canvas strap.

    The other is toppled like
    firewood beside the bed.

    The embroidered box on the bedside table
    that once housed a blown-glass ornament

    now holds my tongue,
    that dark knot of sleeping muscle.

    Here is the beginning of "Clockwatcher":

    The night is not a hole
    to fill with your thoughts.
    It is not a sock to stuff
    deep into the gob of morning
    and hope the sun has
    soiled itself there on the couch
    where it collapsed after the gin.

    I gave this book 3 stars because although I liked it, it isn't quite my cup of tea. I wouldn't spurn another book by this poet but I also wouldn't go looking for one. This is based solely on my level of tolerance for the surreal, which I do like but have some limits, as mentioned above. However, if I saw him listed on an anthology, I would be instantly curious to see whether his contribution was one that would hit home with me or not--and whether the anthology had other surrealist poems. So I would say, enter at your own risk. It's not a great risk (only of befuddlement and perhaps a squeamish moment) but there is some risk. And, yes, I know that risk is just what some people are looking for.
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  • Whitney
    5.0 out of 5 stars WONDERFULLY HAUNTING IMAGERY
    Reviewed in the United States on May 31, 2017
    Verified Purchase
    Excellent! I "met him" on twitter after ordering the book. So nice and gracious. Also this book, I have read reread and still think if some of the poems. They are beautiful and haunting and confounding all wrapped together between two covers. I am about to preorder his next one. A great modern poet who writes so well that it was refreshing after the onslaught on "insta-poets."
    One person found this helpful
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