The Echo Chamber: Poems

(Paperback)

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From Michael Bazzett, poet and translator ofThe 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. InThe 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 qualitieshow reflective waters enable self-absorption, the tragicrightnessof Echo and Narcissus as a couple.

The Echo Chamberexamines 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 foolsthe 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 Chambercreates an echo through time, holding up the broken mirror of myth to our present-day selves.

Reviews

Praise for Michael Bazzett

Michael Bazzett's remarkable fifth book is a testament of his awareness and hard-earned poetic grace. He is a poet of unexpected observations and dynamic lyricisms, and these often funny, often difficult poems linger on how contemporary mythos is created: by selfies, by repurposing, memeing, and retweetings. This is work that dwells in the complexity and grotesqueness of being seen--and of seeing ourselves--through the fractured mirrors of pop culture and consumption. This beautifully wrought book is a reminder that after all of the likes and shares, the myths we create for ourselves are as temporary as the hashtags we use to boost them.--Adrian Matejka

"With a virtuoso deployment of allegory, parable, dialogue, soliloquy, and performance, and via the mechanics of the joke, the poems in The Echo Chamber boom and toll with history and myth, and into the scorching present tense. "I walked down to the 7-Eleven / for a Big Gulp in lieu of coffee / and this ill-considered choice // was history," he writes in the opening poem, enacting the wry confluences that characterize the collection. Bazzett's sensibility is satirical, with a penchant for the surreal. War, background noise from the television to those privileged enough not to be in the thick of it, "thrums up through your espadrilles," accompanied by "seared tuna with lemons, halved / and roasted on the grill." Indeed, violence, with white needle teeth, seethes beneath the surface of tenderness here, and swirls at the nucleus of myth. Bazzett has a singular gift for ripping off the Band-Aid, rooting and unmasking himself, you and me, and God. The Echo Chamber is a masterwork of truth-telling.-Diane Seuss

"If he's not already acknowledged as such, The Echo Chamber should establish Michael Bazzett as one of our best cartographers of human strangeness. Through time-traveling speakers, tumors shaped like angels, men seeking old testament gods in personal ads, and all our private thoughts written in blood, these poems unleash a powerful imagination to make us see our world in a new way. This book is many things: funny, unsettling, always surprising, and profound." -Matthew Olzmann

"Bazzett's poems keep pleasantly surprising me with their innocent brutality. I'm not sure I have any way to clearly describe this except to say that it is the sort of heart stopping honesty about humanity we see in work like Donald Barthelme's 'The School' or Toni Cade Bambara's 'The Lesson.' Both of these are short stories, I understand, but I'm okay with that because Bazzett's talky, lyrically twisted narratives seems to ride the same sort of line between story and poem that we see in Borges and chunks of Calvino."Camille Dungy, The Rumpus

"Like any good surrealist, Bazzett uses laserlike precision to craft his images."Minneapolis Star Tribune

"To read Bazzett's poems is to reach through the thick veil separating us from the most tender, timeless, and true parts of ourselves that we both dread and cherish."Tarfia Faizullah

"Bazzett [is] as a keen questioner of the eye and ear; a poet fully able to construct and inhabit this world, and those beyond, through lush aural and visual engagement. With the lyrical dexterity and sonic authority of a master craftsman, Bazzett gleans epistemic truths from both natural and preternatural sources and delivers crisp, unforced poems of sheer beauty. Readers will find themselves rapt by Bazzett's audacious and perfect storm of song, symbol and earnest sight."Airea D. Matthews

Praise for The Interrogation

"Our lives are interrogated by strangeness in this brilliant collection by Bazzett, his best yet. From the moment a city dissolved in the speaker's absence, I knew this book was something special, and how special it is to read the record of Bazzett's keen looking and bizarro dreaming. I didn't know I wanted poems about moles being comets or pubic hair performance artists, but I did. I needed this book. I needed to laugh and wonder and wince and gasp. I needed to see all this glorious seeing. You need this book too. You need to walk through Bazzett's funhouse and let these mirrors do their alchemy on you."Danez Smith

"Bazzett's staggering new collection, The Interrogation, is the record of a poet curious about, and in dialogue with, absolutely everything. An island paradise 'No stallion land, / but good for goats.' Death 'A hole behind him / in the exact shape of his life.' If poems are buildings erected to house our wonder, then Bazzett has gifted us a metropolisone teeming with life and endlessly hospitable to visitors. We are the beneficiaries of such good fortune, this generous making."Kaveh Akbar

"Bazzett encounters the disorienting juncture between fairy tale and nightmare in his latest collection. His works are often reminiscent of Russell Edson, bizarre poems that feature malevolence and a chilling atmosphere balanced by humor and twisted logic."Publishers Weekly

"'You don't expect / our warmth / to be the thing / that obscures us, ' Bazzett writes in a book that explores the limits of identity and definition. His work is a vivid reminder that imagination makes the world strange in order for us to see what we've forgotten or taken for granted. There's also one stop shopping here, as you'll get surrealism, lyricism, and narrative, often within the same poem, which makes his work both full and lithe. Best of all, he's a poet who'll take you where no one else can. You'll want to stay there."Bob Hicok

Praise for You Must Remember This

"You Must Remember This is a book of unnerving wonders, one in which improbable events are narrated with strange intimacy, lucidity, and sly wit. But Bazzett is much more than a writer of imaginative narratives. Somewhere beneath the surfaces of these wild and lovely poems, I hear the clashing of individual personality with popular myth. You Must Remember This is an amazing book, one that continues to whisper in my ear after I've put it down."Kevin Prufer

"Powered by the engine of the tricky dreaming mind, the poems in You Must Remember This are both hauntingly fable-like and delightfully idiosyncratic. Offering spectacular insight into the idea of longing for one's own estranged self, Bazzett's poems are as tragic and unsettling as they are compelling and beautifully precise."Ada Limn

"A debut collection whose mercurial sensibility and loose-woven free verse place Bazzett somewhere between Robert Hass and 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."Publishers Weekly

Author Bio

Michael Bazzett is the author of The Echo Chamber, as well as five other collections of poems, including The Interrogation and You Must Remember This, winner of the Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry. He is also the translator of The Popol Vuh. Bazzett is a poet, teacher, and 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, Guernica, Virginia Quarterly Review, Copper Nickel, The Rumpus, and Best New Poets. He lives in Minneapolis.