Poetry. Introduction by Nick Flynn. With his deft and timeless blend of the lyrical and narrative, Fred Marchant explores the wars inside us and the ones we wage in the world: spiritual, familial, political. "In the spirit of Wilfred Owen, TIPPING POINT is a book seared by personal and historical fact. Many artists are eager to assume the mantle of 'witness,' as if will or ambition could do the work of experience and imagination. In contrast, the gravity, modesty, and moral questioning in Marchant's poems reveal a mind committed to a version of history that is resolutely human scale."—Tom Sleigh "Explicit in its detailing, subtly graded in its responsiveness, TIPPING POINT is also a kind of latter-day metaphysics of morals. Marchant searches out the hidden springs of action and yet never loses sight of the larger contexts in which our deeds and gestures come to matter. An honest, earned book."—Sven Birkerts

Tipping Point

Literature & Fiction

Marchant, Fred.

Poetry

Word Works

Tipping Point (20th Anniversary Edition)

History & Criticism

The Word Works

In 1970, during the war in Viet Nam, Marchant became one of the first Marine officers ever to be honorably discharged as a conscientious objector. In the poems contained in Full Moon Boat, Marchant explores the concept of violence: What are its origins and consequences? What actions of the heart and mind resist it? Marchant takes us on a voyage from childhood to adult trauma, and eventually to a peace arrived at by unflinching meditation. A hard-won peace, it is our undiscovered country.

Full Moon Boat: Poems

Graywolf Press

"To my mind, what distinguishes Marchant's work is his willingness to take a hard look at human suffering while maintaining his unflinching, delicate tone." ―The Journal house that floats on a muddy river in spring-time flood, house like a human head on the surface, house with a boy's face, turned up. ―from "House on Water, House in Air"
In The Looking House―Fred Marchant's new collection of poems―the poet lays out a map of human suffering, from wars within the psyche to wars that rage across the contemporary landscape. These intense, innovative lyrics stir and disturb, remaining aware of the way history bears down upon us and makes us responsible for the consequences of our choices. Marchant maps the shelters, the "precarious places" that give us refuge and "teach us everything." Such a place might be an open window at midnight in childhood, or the broken sill of a deserted hut on the coast of Donegal. In these poems a "looking house" can just as easily be a locked ward, a barracks, a movie theater at midday, or that room in Rome where Keats lay dying. These poems may show us a broken world, but they also offer glimpses of survival and renewal, of trust and reconnection.

The Looking House: Poems

“Fred Marchant teaches and awakens the soul.” ―Maxine Hong Kingston someone in Benghazi with a hose in one hand uses his free one to wipe down the corpse water flows over the body and down a tilted steel tray toward the drain what washes off washes off
―“Below the Fold”
In this important and formally inventive new poetry collection, Fred Marchant brings us into realms of the intractable and the unacceptable, those places where words seem to fail us and yet are all we have. In the process he affirms lyric poetry’s central role in the contemporary moral imagination. As the National Book Award winner David Ferry writes, “The poems in this beautiful new book by Fred Marchant are autobiographical, but, as is always the case with his poems, autobiographical of how he has witnessed, with faithfully exact and pitying observation, the sufferings in the lives of other people, for example the heartbreaking series of poems about the fatal mental suffering of his sister, and the poems about other peoples, in Vietnam, in the Middle East, written about with the noble generosity of feeling that has always characterized his work, here more impressively even than before.”
Said Not Said is a poet’s taking stock of conscience, his country’s and his own, and of poetry’s capacity to speak to what matters most.

Said Not Said: Poems

House on Water, House in Air

The Dedalus Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Marchant, Fred.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Marchant, Fred.