From the author of You Must Remember This, an uncanny collection of poems that plumbs our capacity for cruelty and for wonder.

Who? A speaker at once questioner and questioned. An artist who embraces and resists what his work requires of him. "A naked / man in a crowd."

What? Poems at once surreal and vulnerable, refusing to hide their uncomfortable truths behind their wildest imaginings.

Where? In the mind, where "Nobody fails at meditation / like I do." Outside dreamlike cities. In the rich earth under a simple mattress. In new, disorienting fables and seemingly familiar folktales.

When? As a child, spurning his mother. As a young man, seeking wisdom and peace. And as an older man, looking back at what he once was.

Suffused in psychology, uncertainty, and desire, The Interrogation is a catechism of the self--or selves. Inside this collection's hall of mirrors, faces double and multiply endlessly, and voices echo, laugh, and taunt. Why? these poems ask. Why does art demand sacrifice? Why does the heart want what it wants? And how do we escape loneliness?

The Interrogation is an accomplished collection, unsparingly honest, infused with yearning and laced with dark humor.

Author: Michael Bazzett
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Published: 10/10/2017
Pages: 120
Weight: 0.35lbs
Size: 8.60h x 5.70w x 0.80d
ISBN: 9781571314932


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 10/02/2017

About the Author
Bazzett, Michael: - Michael Bazzett is a poet, teacher, and 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, Guernica, Virginia Quarterly Review, Copper Nickel, The Rumpus, and Best New Poets. You Must Remember This, his debut collection, received the 2014 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry. Another collection of poems, Our Lands Are Not So Different, is forthcoming from Horsethief Books. He lives in Minneapolis.