Bethany College
Honsey Hall
700 Luther Drive
Mankato, MN 56001
United States
Free and open to the public.
Join the staff of Inkwell Literary Magazine in welcoming poet Michael Bazzett, who will give a reading of his work. Questions and conversation will follow.
Michael Bazzett’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Sun, Tin House, Copper Nickel, and The Iowa Review. He is the author of three poetry collections – You Must Remember This, (winner of the Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry), Our Lands Are Not So Different (Horsethief 2017), and The Interrogation, (Milkweed 2017) – as well as a recently published verse translation of the Mayan creation epic, The Popol Vuh (Milkweed 2018). The recipient of a 2017 NEA Fellowship in Poetry, he lives in Minneapolis with his wife and two children.
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.
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 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.