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 itself: 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Release date: Oct 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781571317469

Michael Bazzett

Michael Bazzett is the author of The Echo Chamber, as well as five other collections of poems, including The Interrogation and You Must Remember This, winner of the Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry. He is also the translator of The Popol Vuh, which was long-listed for the National Translation Award and named one of the best books of poetry in 2018 by the New York Times. 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. He lives in Minneapolis.

Book preview

History

after Jameson Fitzpatrick

The vinegar tang of a glass of wine

left out on the counter overnight, the hint

of cumin on your fingertips, dried lavender.

All this is the smell of you in summer,

and now it is history. I woke alone

and slid my legs into the twin flannel

tunnels of my sweats, and it was history.

I walked down to the 7-Eleven

for a Big Gulp in lieu of coff e

and this ill-considered choice

was history. The sweet syrup in the mix

had never seen a cane plantation. It was born

of corn, which is what the ancient Maya

said the first people were made of. And yes

this too was history. Is history. Our ability

to take a moment here to quibble over verb tenses

is a consequence swollen fat as a paperback

some thoughtless person left out in the rain

of history. The melodramatic line breaks

in this poem are history. Both the relatively justified

length of line and the use of the word justified

to suggest things come out even in the end

are history. And the head-fake back there

in stanza one where you thought this might be

about the end of a relationship but discovered

otherwise is history. As is your inclination to continue

trusting me. Because the fact that I can take

the time to write this all down, considering what

to include and what to leave out, as I tap keys

that were injection-molded out of a blend

of thermoplastics by distant people I will never

have to think of again is one definition of