Selected Poems 1965-2000

"Go to New York and you'll be famous in five years," Ted Berrigan told Merrill Gilfillan in 1969. That time spent in New York gave rise to Gilfillan's books Truck (Angel Hair) 9:15 (Doone's Press) and his first two books through Berkeley's Blue Wind Press — Skyliner and To Creature. The next fifteen years included more poetry and two award-winning prose collections: Chokecherry Places: Essays from the High Plains (1998), which won the Western States Book Award for Creative Nonfiction, and Magpie Rising (2000), which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction.

This new selected volume collects swatches of unpublished work from the late 1960s, poems from Gilfillan's volumes in the 1970s and '80s, and the entirety of the long out of print books River Through Rivertown (The Figures) and Satin Street (Asphodel).

Merrill Gilfillan attended the University of Michigan, graduating in 1967, where he won the Major Hopwood Prize for poetry in his senior year. He attended the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop for two years, studying with Ted Berrigan, Anselm Hollo, and George Starbuck among others. He lived and worked in New York City for eight years, and then moved to Colorado, where he wrote feature stories for Boulder/Denver newspapers. He makes his home in Colorado.