Signed by author.

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 these poems, 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.

Fred Marchant is also the author of The Tipping Point and House on Water, House in Air. Tipping Point, which won the Washington Prize in poetry. He is a professor of English and the director of creative writing at Suffolk University in Boston, and he is a teaching affiliate of the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

"In 1970 he was one of the first officers in the United States Marine Corps ever to be discharged honourably as a conscientious objector to the Viet Nam War, a fact that has shaped much of his life and poetry thereafter." -- back cover, House on Water, House in Air