Cloudwatcher

By: Michael Bazzett

Published by American Poetry Review, 2026-04-07

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 can "wipe the name clean off a mountain." Bazzett is a master at building a world slightly parallel to this one, a place of weirdness and mystery, where to be imprisoned in a "cage of one's own desires" comes replete with cedar shavings, feeding 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 addressees 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.