#christopher merrill

[kamreadsandrecs]

A Latter-Day Herodotus: A Tribute to Christopher Merrill by Tom Sleigh - Words Without Borders

Poet Tom Sleigh offers an encomium for Christopher Merrill, winner of the 2025 Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature.

[kammartinez]

A Latter-Day Herodotus: A Tribute to Christopher Merrill by Tom Sleigh - Words Without Borders

Poet Tom Sleigh offers an encomium for Christopher Merrill, winner of the 2025 Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature.

[prairielights]

MARVIN BELL, CHRISTOPHER MERRILL & STEPHEN COREY

October 23, 2018 - 7:00pm Prairie Lights

Join us for a lively three-person event with Marvin Bell, Christopher Merrill and Stephen Corey. Marvin Bell and Chris Merrill will read from If & When, the forthcoming sequel to After the Fact: Scripts & Postscripts. Stephen Corey, editor of the Georgia Review in which excerpts of the new book have just been published, will be in conversation with  poets Merrill and Bell.

[jshoulson]

Today’s Poem

A Boy Juggling a Soccer Ball --Christopher Merrill

after practice: right foot to left foot, stepping forward and back, to right foot and left foot, and left foot up to his thigh, holding it on his thigh as he twists around in a circle, until it rolls down the inside of his leg, like a tickle of sweat, not catching and tapping on the soft side of his foot, and juggling once, twice, three times, hopping on one foot like a jump-roper in the gym, now trapping and holding the ball in midair, balancing it on the instep of his weak left foot, stepping forward and forward and back, then lifting it overhead until it hangs there; and squaring off his body, he keeps the ball aloft with a nudge of his neck, heading it from side to side, softer and softer, like a dying refrain, until the ball, slowing, balances itself on his hairline, the hot sun and sweat filling his eyes as he jiggles this way and that, then flicking it up gently, hunching his shoulders and tilting his head back, he traps it in the hollow of his neck, and bending at the waist, sees his shadow, his dangling T-shirt, the bent blades of brown grass in summer heat; and relaxing, the ball slipping down his back. . .and missing his foot.

He wheels around, he marches over the ball, as if it were a rock he stumbled into, and pressing his left foot against it, he pushes it against the inside of his right until it pops into the air, is heeled over his head—the rainbow!— and settles on his extended thigh before rolling over his knee and down his shin, so he can juggle it again from his left foot to his right foot —and right foot to left foot to thigh— as he wanders, on the last day of summer, around the empty field.

[prairielights]

CHRISTOPHER MERRILL

February 16, 2017 - 7:00pm Prairie Lights

IWP Director Christopher Merrill will read from his new memoir, Self-Portrait With Dogwood.

[homelesshomielove-blog]

Because

Because everything I read smells of smoke;

Because sometimes I wake at night to find my hands covered with salt, my sheet wrapped around me like a sail;

Because I can’t tell if this is the desert or the sea;

Because I never learned to read the stars and don’t know where we’re heading;

Because of this and more, much more. I hid your name in the well... and here it is again, filling my cup.

-Christopher Merrill

[hyperallergic]

Our poetry editor, Joe Pan, has selected four poems by Chanho Song translated from the Korean by Won-Chung Kim and Christopher Merrill for his series that brings original poetry to the screens of Hyperallergic readers.

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[mathstalioreads]

To write on wax, one has to erase the letters previously written there, and to bring sacred teaching to the soul, one must begin by wiping out preoccupations rooted in ordinary habits.

St. Basil, Things of the Hidden God, Christopher Merrill