Cloudwatcher
Description
Winner of the inaugural 2025 Stern Prize from The American Poetry Review, Michael Bazzett's astonishing Cloudwatcher is laced with wit and buoyed by a welcome eccentricity.
In Cloudwatcher, Michael Bazzett's poems reside in an otherwhere of missing rivers and bottled starlight, where the sea leaves cryptic letters for beachcombers on shore, where rain "wipe[s] the name clean off the mountain." Bazzett is a master at building a world slightly parallel to this one, a place of weirdness and mystery where a "cage of [one's] own desires" comes replete with cedar shavings, feed tray, and water bottle. With its evocative imagery and language crackling with energy, Cloudwatcher brings us to a place where the eternal rubs shoulders with the everyday, leaving us with a heightened sense of how absurd and wondrous it is to inhabit a temporary body in this world, and the life-affirming reminder that "until / you crack a bit, you can't be over-joyed."
The Stern Prize is an exciting new partnership from The American Poetry Review and Copper Canyon Press that addresses an often-overlooked category in book prizes: poets 50 years of age or older who are contributing innovative and dynamic works to the publishing landscape.
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Person
Michael Bazzett is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently The Echo Chamber (Milkweed Editions, 2021)—as well as a verse translation of the creation epic of the Maya, The Popol Vuh (Milkweed, 2018), named by The New York Times as one of the best poetry books of 2018. His translation of the selected poems of Humberto Ak'abal, If Today Were Tomorrow, was published by Milkweed in 2024, and his chapbook, They: A Field Guide, was the editors' choice for the Tomaž Šalamun Prize (Factory Hollow, 2024). The recipient of National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in both poetry and translation, his poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, GRANTA, The Nation, The Paris Review, The London Magazine, Poetry Review, and The Sun.