The Interrogation
Poems
Published on 5. October 2021
120 pages
978-1-57131-962-3 (ISBN)
Description
This surreal, darkly humorous, and relentlessly probing poetry collection resides at "the disorienting juncture between fairy tale and nightmare" (
Publishers Weekly).
Suffused in psychology, uncertainty, and desire, Michael Bazzett's The Interrogation is an unsparingly honest catechism of the self. In the title poem, a speaker-at once questioner and questioned-insistently asks: Who? What? Where? Why? Why our cruelty? Why our loneliness? And how do we connect?
These poems read like disorienting fables and seemingly familiar folktales. In them, we are escorted to dreamlike cities, brought into the rich earth under a simple mattress, and drawn inside the mind, where "Nobody fails at meditation / like I do."
Suffused in psychology, uncertainty, and desire, Michael Bazzett's The Interrogation is an unsparingly honest catechism of the self. In the title poem, a speaker-at once questioner and questioned-insistently asks: Who? What? Where? Why? Why our cruelty? Why our loneliness? And how do we connect?
These poems read like disorienting fables and seemingly familiar folktales. In them, we are escorted to dreamlike cities, brought into the rich earth under a simple mattress, and drawn inside the mind, where "Nobody fails at meditation / like I do."
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11/2017
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Person
Michael 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.
You Must Remember This, his debut collection, received the 2014 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry. Another collection of poems,
Our Lands Are Not So Different, is forthcoming from Horsethief Books. He lives in Minneapolis.
Content
Contents
Cruelty
I
The City
At Night
Nowhere
At Half-Island
The Central Registry
Ithaca
They Held It in Their Hands
The Unnerving Thing
The Cellar
Everybody
Sunflowers
Okay
The Subterranean
II
The Dawdler
The Interrogation
In the Himalayas
The Earth Inside
The Silence
The Man with No Mouth
The Matrons
There Are Things We Cannot See
Moles
My Body Is Not an Axe
Nobody Fails at Meditation
On the One Hand
To the Woman Drinking Three Gin & Tonics
III
The Phone Call
Lazarus
The Birth
When He Was A Boy
The Fable of the Man
Early November
Country Squire Landscape Services
Hold Me
IV
Confessions
The Handshake
Island
Other Names for Fire
The Fact
The Mechanic
The Encounter
Rain
Last Exit
The Telepathic Heart
For the Person I Have Not Met
On the Subway
Miles
Gag
I Went to the Market
The Book of My Life
V
[ the words I have not written ]
They
The Meat of It
In the Book
The Hole
The Little Things
The Monster
The Two of Us
Almost Invisible
The Light
The Plot
Acknowledgments
Cruelty
I
The City
At Night
Nowhere
At Half-Island
The Central Registry
Ithaca
They Held It in Their Hands
The Unnerving Thing
The Cellar
Everybody
Sunflowers
Okay
The Subterranean
II
The Dawdler
The Interrogation
In the Himalayas
The Earth Inside
The Silence
The Man with No Mouth
The Matrons
There Are Things We Cannot See
Moles
My Body Is Not an Axe
Nobody Fails at Meditation
On the One Hand
To the Woman Drinking Three Gin & Tonics
III
The Phone Call
Lazarus
The Birth
When He Was A Boy
The Fable of the Man
Early November
Country Squire Landscape Services
Hold Me
IV
Confessions
The Handshake
Island
Other Names for Fire
The Fact
The Mechanic
The Encounter
Rain
Last Exit
The Telepathic Heart
For the Person I Have Not Met
On the Subway
Miles
Gag
I Went to the Market
The Book of My Life
V
[ the words I have not written ]
They
The Meat of It
In the Book
The Hole
The Little Things
The Monster
The Two of Us
Almost Invisible
The Light
The Plot
Acknowledgments
