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. These 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.”
ISBN: 9798987585252
Format: Paperback
“Transitory”
Nothing’s more fleeting than a cloud. Yet here
it’s been overcast for days. April snow,
with thunder up above. There is an urge
to eat roasted meat and drink quietly
in the afternoons. Because human
beings are terrestrial most of their possessions
remain on earth. But we nonetheless
name what strikes in places beyond us.
For instance, there is a name for the crackling
air within and around the charged vein
that threads the clouds so suddenly together—
it is called a lightning channel and was
mere sky a moment prior. Heat and light
bolt through the rain to settle fresh
imbalance. From a distance, silver staples.
Fine white roots that hair the dark.
Or the plum-dark skin of the storm
split open. Inside the clouds, in the airliner’s
juddering fuselage, passengers feel it
in their chambered lungs.
Praise for Cloudwatcher
“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