Milkweed Books
1011 Washington Avenue S
Suite 107
Minneapolis, MN 55415
United States
THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. REGISTER HERE.
Join us for a special panel discussion in our monthly event series Milkweed Presents! For this conversation, Michael Bazzett, author of poetry books such as The Echo Chamber and You Must Remember This, leads a talk with guest writers Danez Smith, Kathryn Savage, and Mairead Small Staid about the concept of “difficult joy,” what goes into working toward happiness in the most fraught of circumstances, and what catharsis writing on these moments can bring.
Please join us in-person at Milkweed Books, our brick-and-mortar independent bookstore located on the first floor of Open Book, at 6 p.m. for an unforgettable discussion about searching for difficult joy, in life and in writing.
Milkweed Presents is a monthly event series featuring Milkweed authors as curators of conversation with local writers and community organizers on a topic of their choosing. These events are held in-person in our bookstore, Milkweed Books, on the first Wednesday of the month.
Our Fall 2023 slate of Milkweed Presents includes:
September 6th: Ancestor Trouble, hosted by Juliet Patterson
October 4th: A Conversation on Difficult Joy, hosted by Michael Bazzett
November 1st: A Spotlight on QTBIPOC Poets, hosted by torrin a. greathouse
Michael Bazzett
Michael Bazzett is the author of You Must Remember This, which received the 2014 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, The Interrogation, and most recently The Echo Chamber. He is also the translator of The Popol Vuh, the first English verse translation of the Mayan creation epic, which was named one a New York Times Best Book of 2018. His poems have appeared in numerous publications, including Ploughshares, The Sun, and Best New Poets. He is a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and lives in Minneapolis.
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.
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.
Suffused in psychology, uncertainty, and desire, this collection is a darkly humorous and unsparingly honest catechism of the self.
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.