Boat: Poems

Poetry. Like Neruda and Paz, Perse and Milosz, Christopher Merrill is both a writer and a diplomat, crisscrossing the globe as chronicler and courier. BOAT records a series of passages over a decade, employing varied formal strategies: meditations and fantasias, prose poems and versets, lyric sequences and narratives, translations and ghazals. Composed in war zones and embassies, refugee camps and monasteries, BOAT is a logbook tracking questions of memory, the body and body politic, faith, mortality, and the ways of knowledge moves through generations.Reflecting ten years of life on the wing and forty years of writing, including extensive translation from other languages, BOAT bears witness to what Merrill has heard and seen in places most Americans will never visit.

Christopher Merrill has published five previous collections of poetry, including Watch Fire, winner of the Academy of American Poets's Lavan Award; ten books of translations; six edited volumes; and five books of nonfiction, including The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War (Milkweed, 2011), which chronicles travels in Malaysia, China, Mongolia, and the Middle East. His writings have been translated into twenty-five languages. A member of the National Council on the Humanities and the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO, he directs the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.