The Interrogation

by Michael Bazzett

Overview

This surreal, darkly humorous, and relentlessly probing poetry collection resides at “the disorienting juncture between fairy tale and nightmare” (Publishers Weekly).

Suffused in psychology, uncertainty, and desire, Michael Bazzett’s The Interrogation is an unsparingly honest catechism of the self. In the title poem, a speaker—at once questioner and questioned—insistently asks: Who? What? Where? Why? Why our cruelty? Why our loneliness? And how do we connect?

These poems read like disorienting fables and seemingly familiar folktales. In them, we are escorted to dreamlike cities, brought into the rich earth under a simple mattress, and drawn inside the mind, where “Nobody fails at meditation / like I do.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781571319623
Publisher:	Milkweed Editions
Publication date:	10/05/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	120
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

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.

Read an Excerpt

At Half-Island

At Half-island, slate-gray water breaks
over rock and plasters
weeds like hair against the granite

It has been this way for years

the sea always swelling

the tides in flux

the breathing of the world

And anyone who pauses to sit
and watch the sea do its work

will feel a deep-breathing swell
slowly fill
the channels of their body

*

When the tide left the orca
slack on the rock

the men went out in tall oyster-boots
to take its teeth

They had a fine-gauge blade
for the enamel

Each tooth worn and grooved
as wood

a single one would fill your palm
with its heft

like an old flint-knife
found in a cave
*

One look at the angled whale

said something
was lodged in its belly

and soon the men
were cursing and gawping

as they pulled
the better part
of a moose out

including one
fine-hoofed foreleg
folded neat
as a camp-chair
and half a rack
of splintered antler

* I could see it then:

The wild-eyed moose
jolted in its crossing
as the water
swelled fat and black around his churning
then dragged quickly down
to be bolted
in torn hunks
where the broken
antler did its piercing work
and the orca’s dark
life drained slowly
into its own belly

*

Maybe it is already
too late to talk
about appetite

or how we live
with rock and water
yet listen to neither

or how we cannot recognize
ourselves when delivered
ourselves through signs

as when our souls
take the form of gulls

crying again and again
the one
sharp word

we all have in common —

* * *

Other Names for Fire

for Mark Leidner

1. Kiss-me-not.
2. Sunlight released from the prison of the tree.
3. Rust on meth.
4. Creature made of tongue and wing.
5. Naughty flower.
6. Soul of the coal.
7. He who grows hungrier the more he’s fed.
8. East European candle blossom.
9. Fool’s lightning.
10. A single neuron sizzling in the mind of the Sun.
11. Hell’s shag carpeting.
12. A chandelier of lickings.
13. Idiot’s lip-gloss.
14. Spicy cousin to the comet.
15. Bourbon of the Air.
16. Electricity’s nonchalant cousin visiting from Texas.
17. Lucifer’s bouquet.
18. The cave-dancer’s doppelgänger.
19. The glint in the eye of the gun.
20. Yellow hat, orange shirt, red pants, blue shoes.

* * *

The Meat of It

To make a good book you need what William
Faulkner called “the raw meat on the floor.”
So before I started in I got some ground beef
and dropped it on the hardwood with a Spat!
It felt wrong. Like dropping a baby. But I did it
for art. When my son came home from school
he said, Why is there meat on the floor? I said,
Art. He nodded like maybe that made sense
and said, It’s kind of freaking me out. I know,
I said, me too. We all have to make sacrifices.
Is that blood leaking out or juice? he asked.
I’m not sure I’m one to make that distinction,
I said, mostly to avoid answering the question.
I didn’t tell him how strange it was to unwrap
the meat so carefully, the plastic peeling away
like a onesie on a warm day, and then just sort
of hurl it down at the hardwood with a Spat!
Are we still going to eat it? he asked after a bit.
I’m not sure, I said. I think it depends upon
a lot of different factors, a lot of ins and outs.
Is this a writing thing? he asked, because you
have that weird look in your eye. I’m your
father, I said. I held you as a baby. I’d never
use a moment like this just to make a poem.

Table of Contents

Contents

Cruelty

I

The City
At Night
Nowhere
At Half-Island
The Central Registry
Ithaca
They Held It in Their Hands
The Unnerving Thing
The Cellar
Everybody
Sunflowers
Okay
The Subterranean

II

The Dawdler
The Interrogation
In the Himalayas
The Earth Inside
The Silence
The Man with No Mouth
The Matrons
There Are Things We Cannot See
Moles
My Body Is Not an Axe
Nobody Fails at Meditation
On the One Hand
To the Woman Drinking Three Gin&Tonics

III

The Phone Call
Lazarus
The Birth
When He Was A Boy
The Fable of the Man
Early November
Country Squire Landscape Services
Hold Me

IV

Confessions
The Handshake
Island
Other Names for Fire
The Fact
The Mechanic
The Encounter
Rain
Last Exit
The Telepathic Heart
For the Person I Have Not Met
On the Subway
Miles
Gag
I Went to the Market
The Book of My Life

V

[ the words I have not written ]
They
The Meat of It
In the Book
The Hole
The Little Things
The Monster
The Two of Us
Almost Invisible
The Light
The Plot

Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

10/02/2017
Bazzett (You Must Remember This) encounters the disorienting juncture between fairy tale and nightmare in his latest collection. His works are often reminiscent of Russell Edson, bizarre poems that feature malevolence and a chilling atmosphere balanced by humor and twisted logic. In the title poem, the speaker narrates an interrogation with a younger self who may be an imposter: “I walk over to the table and sit,/ recognizing the wary lift of his eyebrows when I say, Why not/ just tell me who you are? And once again he mutters my name.” In another poem, a man with no mouth explains, “I can’t tell you how happy I am to announce/ how happy I am. No, really. I can’t tell you.” Elsewhere, a baby is “born wearing a worsted-wool suit”; a stranger narrates the troubling act of “undoing the series of springs and tiny hooks” that connect his genitals and secretly slips the organs into a fellow subway passenger’s handbag. Bazzett’s simple lines and conversational language counterbalance the unnerving aspects that lurk beneath, never fully breaking the surface. “You hear only the clink of cutlery/ and a child crying. There will// be no gunfire, no serrated light,” he writes. Bazzett’s poems feel almost instinctual: “an extension/ of evolution// flowing from the throat.// Thoughts rise/ like antlers.” (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for The Interrogation

“Our lives are interrogated by strangeness in this brilliant collection by Michael Bazzett, his best yet. From the moment a city dissolved in the speaker’s absence, I knew this book was something special, and how special it is to read the record of Bazzett’s keen looking and bizarro dreaming. I didn’t know I wanted poems about moles being comets or pubic hair performance artists, but I did. I needed this book. I needed to laugh and wonder and wince and gasp. I needed to see all this glorious seeing. You need this book too. You need to walk through Bazzett’s funhouse and let these mirrors do their alchemy on you.”—Danez Smith

“Michael Bazzett’s staggering new collection, The Interrogation, is the record of a poet curious about, and in dialogue with, absolutely everything. An island paradise? ‘No stallion land, / but good for goats.’ Death? ‘A hole behind him / in the exact shape of his life.’ If poems are buildings erected to house our wonder, then Bazzett has gifted us a metropolis—one teeming with life and endlessly hospitable to visitors. We are the beneficiaries of such good fortune, this generous making.”—Kaveh Akbar

"Like any good surrealist, Bazzett uses laserlike precision to craft his images."—Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Bazzett encounters the disorienting juncture between fairy tale and nightmare in his latest collection. His works are often reminiscent of Russell Edson, bizarre poems that feature malevolence and a chilling atmosphere balanced by humor and twisted logic."—Publishers Weekly

“The Interrogation reminds me that we always have the choice to revel in the striking strangeness of the world we live in, and that we do not have to accept anyone’s life at face value, especially our own. In this daringly disarming world built of wondrous and wondering words, cities have faces, moonlight is poured into aquariums, a man with no mouth speaks, mothers prank call their sons, and fire has many names. ‘Life is a joke best left unspoken,’ asserts the title poem, and the more I read of this adept and artful work, the more true that becomes. To read Michael Bazzett’s poems is to reach through the thick veil separating us from the most tender, timeless, and true parts of ourselves that we both dread and cherish. I hope everyone will read this book.”—Tarfia Faizullah

“In The Interrogation, Michael Bazzett establishes himself as a keen questioner of the eye and ear; a poet fully able to construct and inhabit this world, and those beyond, through lush aural and visual engagement. With the lyrical dexterity and sonic authority of a master craftsman, Bazzett gleans epistemic truths from both natural and preternatural sources and delivers crisp, unforced poems of sheer beauty. Readers will find themselves rapt by Bazzett’s audacious and perfect storm of song, symbol and earnest sight.”—Airea D. Matthews

“‘You don’t expect / our warmth / to be the thing / that obscures us,’ Michael Bazzett writes in a book that explores the limits of identity and definition. His work is a vivid reminder that imagination makes the world strange in order for us to see what we’ve forgotten or taken for granted. There’s also one stop shopping here, as you’ll get surrealism, lyricism, and narrative, often within the same poem, which makes his work both full and lithe. Best of all, he’s a poet who’ll take you where no one else can. You’ll want to stay there.”—Bob Hicok

Praise for You Must Remember This

“Michael Bazzett’s poems keep pleasantly surprising me with their innocent brutality. I’m not sure I have any way to clearly describe this except to say that it is the sort of heart stopping honesty about humanity we see in work like Donald Barthelme’s ‘The School’ or Toni Cade Bambara’s ‘The Lesson.’ Both of these are short stories, I understand, but I’m okay with that because Bazzett’s talky, lyrically twisted narratives seems to ride the same sort of line between story and poem that we see in Borges and chunks of Calvino.”—Camille Dungy, The Rumpus

“You Must Remember This is a book of unnerving wonders, one in which improbable events are narrated with strange intimacy, lucidity, and sly wit. But Michael Bazzett is much more than a writer of imaginative narratives. Somewhere beneath the surfaces of these wild and lovely poems, I hear the clashing of individual personality with popular myth. You Must Remember This is an amazing book, one that continues to whisper in my ear after I’ve put it down.”—Kevin Prufer

“Powered by the engine of the tricky dreaming mind, the poems in You Must Remember This are both hauntingly fable-like and delightfully idiosyncratic. Offering spectacular insight into the idea of longing for one’s own estranged self, Michael Bazzett’s poems are as tragic and unsettling as they are compelling and beautifully precise.”—Ada Limón

“A debut collection whose mercurial sensibility and loose-woven free verse place Michael Bazzett somewhere between Robert Hass and Patricia Lockwood. His pages stand out, amid so many other mildly quirky or eccentric first books, because their verse comes closer than most to presenting real people in his imagined world.”—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher