Christopher's Newest Book

FLARES (AVAILABLE NOW)

The richly imagined fables, vignettes, and prose poems of Flares reveal the elementary strangeness of this world. Here is the improvised travel record of a poet haunted by history, who documents what he discovers in foreign lands with an exacting and hallucinatory eye. Composed in transit, on diplomatic missions to scores of countries, Flares will endure in the reader's imagination as a series of signals in the night, illuminating the hidden corners of our time here on earth. Published by White Pine Press.

Buy the book on Barnes and Noble, Bookshop, and Indiebound.

Other Work

Prose Poetry

Boat (2013)

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.

Necessities (2013)

“Christopher Merrill is one of the most gifted, audacious, and accomplished poets of an extraordinary rich generation. His range of sympathy, subject, and tone has always been prodigious. His grasp of form is sure and in service of clear attention. This collection shows a complex talent developing and extending its original high promise.”

—W S Merwin

After the Fact: Scripts & Postscripts (2016)

"Prose was always meant for colloquy, risk, and intimacy. With these rich and conversant prose poems Marvin Bell and Christopher Merrill return language to sport—sometimes competitive, but often cooperative, exploratory, even humanely probative. What is a friend? Bell and Merrill demonstrate friendship is drawn from imagination."

–Stephen Kuusisto

Poetry

The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War (2011)

"Christopher Merrill is on an ardent lifelong quest and luckily he is taking us along. His three journeys in The Tree of the Doves are deep, wandering investigations where the old world meets the new, where the person becomes politic, and where peace many times has just left the room..."

–Ron Carlson

Non-Fiction

Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain (2005)

"A gem that shows off Merrill-the-poet's gorgeous writing, and Merrill-the-reporter's sharp eye—and introduces a new Merrill, the pilgrim."

–The Spectator

Flash Fiction International: Very Short Stories from Around the World (2015)

A dazzling new anthology of the very best very short fiction from around the world.

Christopher Merrill

Features and Media

“Dividing Lines”: On Poetry and Diplomacy

April 23, 2021

Author Christopher Merrill poses with a group that is participating in a Lines and Spaces Creative Writing Workshop program in Morocco. (Photo courtesy of the International Writing Program)

Chris's essay for DipNote, the U.S. Department of State's official blog, is about the deep connection between poetry and diplomacy—from promoting clarifying discussions integral to diplomacy to strengthening our powers of empathy. "Vital meetings can take place within a single line of verse," Chris asserts.

Read the essay now.