The Echo Chamber: Poems

by Michael Bazzett

From Michael Bazzett, poet and translator of The Popol Vuh , a collection that explores the myth of Echo and Narcissus, offering a reboot, a remix, a reimagining. “Narcissus was never one to see himself // in moving water. // He liked his image / still.” In The Echo Chamber , myth is refracted into our current moment. A time traveler teaches a needleworker the pleasures of social media gratification. A man goes looking for his face and is first offered a latex mask. A book reveals eerie transmutations of a simple story. And the myth itself is retold, probing its most provocative qualities—how reflective waters enable self-absorption, the tragic rightness of Echo and Narcissus as a couple. The Echo Chamber examines our endlessly self-referential age of selfies and televised wars and manufactured celebrity, gazing lingeringly into the many kinds of damage it produces, and the truths obscured beneath its polished surface. In the process, Bazzett cements his status as one of our great poetic fools—the comedian who delivers uncomfortable silence, who sheds layers of disguises to reveal light underneath, who smuggles wisdom within “rage-mothered laughter.” Late-stage capitalism, history, death all are subject to his wry, tender gaze. By turns searing, compassionate, and darkly humorous, The Echo Chamber creates an echo through time, holding up the broken mirror of myth to our present-day selves.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

Published October 12, 2021

About the author

MICHAEL BAZZETT is the author of five books of poetry: You Must Remember This, (Winner of the 2014 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry); Our Lands Are Not So Different (Horsethief Books, 2017); The Interrogation (Milkweed Editions, 2017); The Temple (Bull City Press, 2020); and The Echo Chamber (Milkweed, 2021). His translation of the creation epic of the Maya, The Popol Vuh, (Milkweed, 2018) was named one of 2018's best books of poetry by the New York Times. He is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and his poems have appeared in numerous publications, including Ploughshares, The Sun, The American Poetry Review, Tin House, & The Iowa Review. A longtime faculty member at The Blake School, in Minneapolis, Bazzett has received the Bechtel Prize from Teachers & Writers Collaborative.

Reviews

[Benjamin Niespodziany · Rating 5 out of 5]

Michael Bazzett is burrowing deeper into the myth. The surreal, the strange, the tender, the gentle. Meditative and mystical, The Echo Chamber might be his strongest collection yet. Full of quiet humor and magical leaps.

[Amy]

Favorite poems:
I Travel Back in Time (clever)

Movie Night (quite gruesome; I read it as an anti-meat-eating poem; one of the best shifts from one stanza to the next that I've read in some time: "...that fuses the cask of the ribcage shut.//A lovely night, we all agree...")

Florida (I love the concessions the speakers makes for all animals, including "foolish" humans and the ugly eating frenzy of baby gators and blissfully ignorant dogs)

Part of the Animal (not sure who "they" are; there's a mystery here about the essence of humanity that I haven't quite teased out; it's a poem I'm sure I'll return to)

At Fifty (bittersweet lamenting of the speaker's growing children; these lines are killer: "The days/are far too long, the years/quick as a whisper.")

The Procedure (I am drawn to the innocence of the body/speaker in this poem who doesn't quite get it; the gods seem slightly cruel here, deceptive at least)

Lastly, I appreciate the humor in "Echo & Narcissus, Revisited:"

And yes, he was/(as they used to say in olden times)/a stone-cold fox (LOL)

And what exactly do you want me to
do with that information, said the boy. (what a little sh!t)

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved these. Speculative and inquiring poems that weave together time, myth, and mortality. I can't wait to read more from this author.

[Alarie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my fourth book of poems by Michael Bazzett in addition to his translation of The Popul Vuh, and I already feel like I’m running out of ways to describe what I read. There must be a bazillion things to say about Bazzett’s work, but he says them all himself in ways that make reviews feel dry and lacking. In his blurb, Matthew Olzmann says this collection “should establish Bazzett as one of our best cartographers of human strangeness.” I’d go ahead and give him the grand title.

Each Bazzett book goes off in unforeseen directions, can terrify and amuse, make us read a poem and read it again and maybe again a third time before we can bear to turn the page. Yet each collection has its own personality.

I don’t know how recently Bazzett wrote these poems, but my own bleaker view of the world in the past couple of years makes me think he was the sober eye taking notes on mankind’s inhumanity and holding the mirror up to us during the pandemic. Unlike Narcissus, who stars in many of these poems, some of us cringe at what we see and some of us look over our shoulders to see just who the moron is that is acting that way. Not me! Not me! Still, not seeing our true selves may be slightly better than falling in love with our every lie and selfish act. Much of the book involves retelling the myth of Echo and Narcissus, hence the book’s title.

“Inside the Trojan Horse” reads like an excerpt from a Greek tragedy. Some off-stage narrator perhaps is asking questions of the Trojan chorus (like why a horse would be the gift that fooled them)…

“And where did the invaders lie?

In an unworded silence

in the stifling interior

in the belly of the animal–

And why?

Appetite–

And why?

It is always only appetite

And if?


If we had built

our building as ruins


it would have saved us

so much time–…”


One of the most disturbing poems for me was “The Problem”:

“…those who had been

unable to resist

owning a grizzly the size of a house

cat were forced to watch

the animals

slowly lose the function of their back legs

and drag their limbs behind them

in an uncanny echo

of a miniature sea lion.

What made it worse

was how good-

natured the little bears turned out to be,

how accepting

of their fate, as if they’d known

their legs would last only a little while,…”

To summarize, I want to mention one last poem, “The Singular Library of Mr. N____.”

“Every night, he returns home and reads the same book…

The thing is, it is always the same book. But what it says

changes. With every reading. Sometimes just a word or two.

Sometimes bigger things.”

Although the poem veers into the realm of surrealism or magical realism, this is the sort of magic Bazzett manages in his poems. You can come back and read them again or someone else can borrow your book, but every reading will be different.

[Hákon Gunnarsson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I came across this book without any prior knowledge of the author, but the title sounded interesting, and turns out the book is just that. Pretty strong in parts. Most of the poems are serious, or have a serious undertone at least, but one of my favorite is actually the most whimsical poem in the book, called "A Stone", and it begins like this:

wrote a book of poems,

seventy-odd pages
and each empty.

it was called happy to wait,

And it continues along those lines. There is something so interesting about the imagery in this poem, something so light, and still there is something more there. It is similar to "This Line Means Nothing" which is also rather abstract, and perhaps more about the form than anything else, but still have enough to be interesting.

There are others that are more about the modern world, like "Echo" for example which is probably one of the best poems I've read about the way we are outsourcing our memories to social media. The author prods this without being mean or overly critical, just points it out in a such a great way. He does similar thing in "I Travel Back in Time", another brilliant poem about our slightly odd relationship with social media, but that one is actually closer to flash fiction than poem in my view.

On the whole I like his shorter poems more then the longer ones. Perhaps it is because in those poems he has carved away all extra weight, and the good stuff remains. Pretty good stuff.

[Lena Zhu · Rating 2 out of 5]

I firmly believe that every poem is good. It just needs to be read by a certain audience. Through reading this book, I have realized that I am not the target audience. I read every single poem in this book and was thoroughly confused and had so many questions.

Most of the time, I read poems about love and heartbreak, which is not a theme at all in this book. Some of my favorite poets include Lang Leav, R.H. Sin, and Rupi Kaur. You might say I follow what's popular, but I love reading about love.

Take my review with a grain of salt, considering I was most likely not the intended (or even correct) audience for this book.

[Colombe Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I rate poetry I always give it a 5 star it's like a memoir and is someone's deep thoughts, insecurities, lessons in life, joys, etc. And, I feel it should be honored.
That being said this was not really for me.

[mariah mikaelson · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 // the word choice was honestly inspiring

[Cooch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Four and a half stars

This is mostly very good poetry, though there are one or two weaker moments. There are one or two outstanding poems.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant collection that interspersed the absurdities of modern life with mythology and humor. Loved every poem. Five stars- a must for fans of modern poetry.