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. -W. S. Merwin

Necessities is a meditation on the deepest promptings of the spirit that could be discovered through language. Influenced by his reading of Franz Kafka, Italo Calvino, Zbigniew Herbert, Czeslaw Milosz, Charles Simic, James Tate, and other explorers of the marvelous, these poems are parables, which deepen with each reading.

Christopher Merrill has published four collections of poetry, more than a dozen edited volumes and books of translations, and five works of nonfiction. He is the director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.