Cloudwatcher

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.