The Interrogation

This surreal, darkly humorous, and relentlessly probing poetry collection resides at "the disorienting juncture between fairy tale and nightmare" ( Publishers Weekly). Suffused in psychology, uncertainty, and desire, Michael Bazzett's The Interrogation is an unsparingly honest catechism of the self. In the title poem, a speaker—at once questioner and questioned—insistently asks: Who? What? Where? Why? Why our cruelty? Why our loneliness? And how do we connect? These poems read like disorienting fables and seemingly familiar folktales. In them, we are escorted to dreamlike cities, brought into the rich earth under a simple mattress, and drawn inside the mind, where "Nobody fails at meditation / like I do."