Michael Bazzett is the author of five collections of poetry, including The Echo Chamber (Milkweed Editions, 2021) and Cloudwatcher, winner of the Stern Prize from APR, forthcoming from Copper Canyon at the end of this year. His verse translation of the creation epic of the Maya, The Popol Vuh (Milkweed, 2018), was named by the NY Times as one of the best poetry books of 2018, and his translation of selected poems of Humberto Ak’abal, If Today Were Tomorrow, was published by Milkweed last June. He is a recipient of National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in both poetry and translation, and his poems have recently appeared in Threepenny Review, GRANTA, The Nation, The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, The London Magazine, Kenyon Review, and The Sun.
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Books by Michael Bazzett
By turns poetic and lucid, sinuous and accessible, this verse translation of the Mayan epic—the first of its kind, and the first in the Seedbank series—breathes new life into an essential tale.
A collection that explores the myth of Echo and Narcissus, offering a reboot, a remix, a reimagining—and holding up the broken mirror of myth to late-stage capitalism, social media, and our present-day selves.
Suffused in psychology, uncertainty, and desire, this collection is a darkly humorous and unsparingly honest catechism of the self.
A woozy logic dominates these poems: a heart can become a buzzing hive of bees, a rooster can trigger a series of bombs, a young man can embrace a city bus as his spirit animal. The winner of the 2014 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry is a consistently slippery, enrapturing collection.
Books translated by Michael Bazzett
A masterful bilingual collection of poems rooted in K’iche’ Maya culture illustrating all the ways meaning manifests within our world, and how best to behold it.
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