Michael Bazzett

The Minnesota Star Tribune

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). He has received 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, The Poetry Review, and The Sun.

Books by this author

Awards and Honors

“The one constant in Michael Bazzett’s poetry collection, Cloudwatcher, is delightful strangeness. In one poem, a man in a canoe is dragging a tin cup across a stream, ‘trying to peel the moon- / light off the water.’ In another poem, Bazzett writes: ‘There is an underground river / that would be silver if it ever saw the moon.’ In another poem, we are tackling the gods and somehow miss, falling to the ground. I’m struck by how natural imagery—rivers, the moon, dusk—are lassoed by the poet and reinvented, first as strangeness, and then as something much deeper, perhaps mortality, perhaps the strangeness of mortality, perhaps the strangeness of Time. Tate and Simic would be proud (and surprised).”—Victoria Chang, author of With My Back to the World

“Here the earth is unstable: the water is disappearing, and the ground is absorbing human emptiness and desire. Languages bloom, combine, and swerve through routines of labor, love, and violence. Michael Bazzett’s poems are philosophical, personal, ecological, and always engaged with how we survive ourselves, with how we survive the unknown, with how we compose worlds that die and transform in time.”—Daniel Borzutzky, author of The Murmuring Grief of the Americas