WARD: Poems By Ryan Vine & Echo Chamber by Michael Bazzett

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WARD: Poems By Ryan Vine

The Rumpus, in a review of his work, labeled poet Ryan Vine “a raconteur,” and his superior story-telling skills are on full display in WARD. The poems are witty, teeming with dark humor, political, playful, and the sardonic tone is pitch-perfect for our times, when we seem to have forgotten that an important survival strategy is the ability to laugh at ourselves.

In its heart of hearts, WARD is a book about ethos and mythos, about the creation of a character and the investigation of voice. As one critic, Taylor Collier, wrote: “In the tradition of Kees’s Crusoe poems, Berryman’s Henry poems, and to some degree Yeats’s Crazy Jane poems, [Vine] builds a series of poems around a central character as a means of investigating both interior and exterior contemporary realities.” 

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ISBN: 9781680032598

About The Author:

RYAN VINE is the author of To Keep Him Hidden, winner of the Northeastern Minnesota Book Award, and the Weldon Kees Award-winning chapbook Distant Engines. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Blackbird, The Rumpus, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and on National Public Radio. His honors include the Greensboro Review’s Robert Watson Poetry Prize, three McKnight/ARAC Career Development Grants, an Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship in Poetry from the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and he has been a finalist or nominee for numerous others, including—selected by Robert Pinsky—the Dorset Prize.  He is professor of English at the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth, MN.

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.

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ISBN: 9781571315380

About The Author:

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. 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.