After the Fact - by Christopher Merrill & Marvin Bell (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A iterary testament to friendship and the ways in which a vibrant collaboration can inspire poets to plumb the depths of their experiences.

The concluding volumes of a ten-year-long conversation in prose poetry between the award-winning poets Marvin Bell and Christopher Merrill. They write from different generations and places around the world on a range of themes from memory to politics, aging and mortality, the vagaries of desire and the imagination.

Bell and Merrill wanted to create a wide-ranging dialogue to explore the meaning not only of their separate experiences but of the very ways in which a collaboration fosters a deeper engagement with each other--and the world. In his penultimate message to Merrill, written just hours before he suffered a heart attack from which he never recovered, Bell said that what he loved about their collaboration was that each new prose poem defined his immediate future--which was what After the Fact provided both of them for ten glorious years.

Review Quotes

"Prose was always meant for colloquy, risk, and intimacy. With these rich and conversant prose poems Marvin Bell and Christopher Merrill return spoken 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 author of Letters to Borges

"The best conversationalists intuit and respond to unspoken questions and interstitial meanings, sidelong concerns and secret subjects. They also know how to listen to another's story and hear the line or inflection that calls forth their own tale in a way that enlarges, well, everything. Marvin Bell and Christopher Merrill's stunning epistolary paragraphs illustrate the inner workings of just such an intimate, agile, and sustained conversation. This collaborative, high wire act offers up profound truths in exactly the way the most exciting poems take shape--by leaps of imagination and complete trust in the power of association to bring up riches, songs, and wisdom from the depths."
--Lia Purpura author of On Looking