“Hauntingly fable-like and delightfully idiosyncratic.” —ADA LIMÓN 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 in this collection—selected by Kevin Prufer as the winner of the 2014 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry—Michael Bazzett slices through his poems with a dangerous sense of humor. “Your humor is deft and cutting / my fingers off one by one.” 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 the “many dozen doorways that we don’t walk through each day.” You Must Remember This is a consistently slippery, enrapturing collection of poems. Bazzett delivers a debut whose mercurial sensibility & loose-woven free verse place him somewhere between Robert Hass & 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. Strange events--part charm, part menace--abound, and like Hass, he can veer into a confessional mode & then pull knowingly out. Yet his collection is never slowed by self-consciousness: instead, it's entertaining in its sadness, off-kilter, & defiantly hard to explain. - Publishers Weekly Michael Bazzett’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares , Massachusetts Review , Pleiades , and Best New Poets . He is the author of two chapbooks of poetry and the winner of the Bechtel Prize from Teachers & Writers Collaborative. Michael lives in Minneapolis with his wife and two children. You Must Remember This is his debut full-length collection. You Must Remember This Poems By Michael Bazzett Milkweed Editions Copyright © 2014 Michael Bazzett All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-57131-474-1 Contents After Machado, 3, I, In Vladivostok, 7, Cyclops, 8, The Field Beyond the Wall, 10, Memory, 11, Soirée, 14, When They Meet, They Can't Help It, 15, Clockwatcher, 17, Atlas, 18, The Difficulty of Holding Time, 20, The Same Bones, 21, Some Party, 23, The Building, 25, The Sinclair Gift Emporium, 30, Rather Than Read Another Word, 32, The Last Expedition, 33, Holder Strand, 35, II, Oil and Ash, 39, Look, he said, and pointed, 40, Aria, 42, from A Natural History of Silence, 43, Unspoken, 46, From Chaos, 47, What Might, 49, September Picnic, 51, Interrogation, 53, Lions, 54, A Woman Stands in a Field, 56, The Crisis, 57, Elpenor, 58, Look, Overlook, 59, III, The Dark Thing, 63, The Book of _______________, 64, Nuns, 66, The Shop Across the Street, 67, The People Who Came Afterward, 68, The Professional, 69, Imperfection, 71, The Horse, 72, Now Here, Nowhere, 73, In the Pasture Corner, 75, How It Survived for a While, 76, The School, 77, The Orangutan, 78, Manhood, 79, Foretold, 81, Binary, 82, Recollection, 84, The Last Time I Saw God, 86, CHAPTER 1      In Vladivostok     The woman in the dream     said be careful with your cock     and I suddenly knew     in the way one knows in dreams     that my cock had somehow become     a lever that might detonate     a string of bombs riddling the city     in the way blood clots might lace     a body in its final days.     When I realized I was holding     a rooster, I did not exactly     know what to say. Perhaps     I smiled. I don't know.     There was no mirror     and I've never been able     to see myself in dreams.      Cyclops     The story is such a story we don't always stop to think     about what it was like to be there: that cavern floor     packed with pungent dung, dark as the inner bowels     of an animal when that slab dropped into place: how     utterly it sucked to hear the oaf stirring in his stupor     made uneasy by wine mixing with the bolted flesh     of good friends dispatched while we watched—     it was just a flat-out bad deal for everyone involved.     Polyphemus messed with no one: a law unto himself     there in the hinterland eating goat cheese by the ton     and Odysseus brimming full of the sauce of himself     after out-clevering all Ilium by nestling in the stallion.     He'd had plenty of time to think there in that hollow     belly smelling of fear and fresh sawdust holding his     piss in one endless clench counting droplets of sweat     rivering cold over his ribs and under his breastplate.     And now here he is again groping for his sharpened     pole in pitch dark using one appetite to feed another.     He lays the point in the drowsing embers and jostles     it enough that the cave appears in a blood-warm glow.     You probably know the rest—plu