Winner of the inaugural 2025 Stern Prize from The American Poetry Review, Michael Bazzett's astonishing Cloudwatcher is laced with wit and buoyed by a welcome eccentricity.
In Cloudwatcher, Michael Bazzett's poems reside in an otherwhere of missing rivers and bottled starlight, where the sea leaves cryptic letters for beachcombers on shore, where rain "wipe[s] the name clean off the mountain." Bazzett is a master at building a world slightly parallel to this one, a place of weirdness and mystery where a "cage of [one's] own desires" comes replete with cedar shavings, feed tray, and water bottle. With its evocative imagery and language crackling with energy, Cloudwatcher brings us to a place where the eternal rubs shoulders with the everyday, leaving us with a heightened sense of how absurd and wondrous it is to inhabit a temporary body in this world, and the life-affirming reminder that "until / you crack a bit, you can't be over-joyed."
The Stern Prize is an exciting new partnership from The American Poetry Review and Copper Canyon Press that addresses an often-overlooked category in book prizes: poets 50 years of age or older who are contributing innovative and dynamic works to the publishing landscape.
About the Author :
Michael Bazzett is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently The Echo Chamber (Milkweed Editions, 2021)—as well as a verse translation of the creation epic of the Maya, The Popol Vuh (Milkweed, 2018), named by The New York Times as one of the best poetry books of 2018. His translation of the selected poems of Humberto Ak'abal, If Today Were Tomorrow, was published by Milkweed in 2024, and his chapbook, They: A Field Guide, was the editors' choice for the Tomaž Šalamun Prize (Factory Hollow, 2024). The recipient of National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in both poetry and translation, his poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, GRANTA, The Nation, The Paris Review, The London Magazine, Poetry Review, and The Sun.
Review :
Praise for Cloudwatcher
“The one constant in Michael Bazzett's poetry collection, Cloudwatcher, is delightful strangeness. In one poem, a man in a canoe is dragging a tin cup across a stream, "trying to peel the moon- / light off the water." In another poem, Bazzett writes: "There is an underground river / that would be silver if it ever saw the moon." In another poem, we are tackling the gods and somehow miss, falling to the ground. I'm struck by how natural imagery—rivers, the moon, dusk—are lassoed by the poet and reinvented, first as strangeness, and then as something much deeper, perhaps mortality, perhaps the strangeness of mortality, perhaps the strangeness of Time. Tate and Simic would be proud (and surprised)."—Victoria Chang, author of With My Back to the World
“Here the earth is unstable: the water is disappearing, and the ground is absorbing human emptiness and desire. Languages bloom, combine, and swerve through routines of labor, love, and violence. Michael Bazzett's poems are philosophical, personal, ecological, and always engaged with how we survive ourselves, with how we survive the unknown, with how we compose worlds that die and transform in time."—Daniel Borzutzky, author of The Murmuring Grief of the Americas
