You Must Remember This

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. Yet Bazzett slices through his poems with a dangerous sense of humor. “Your humor is deft and cutting / my fingers off one by one,” as one poem puts it. Once dismembered, Bazzett’s poems can re-member us and piece together the ways in which we once thought we knew ourselves, creating a new, strange sense of self.

A meditation on who we are, who we’ve been, and what we might become, Bazzett’s writing is like a note written in invisible ink: partially what we see on the page, but also but also the “many dozen doorways that we don’t walk through each day.” You Must Remember This is a consistently slippery, enrapturing collection of poems.