Nicholas Christopher has been praised as one of America’s most important poets by such literary talents as John Ashbery, Charles Simic, James Merrill, and Anthony Hecht. Crossing the Equator collects Christopher’s best work from the past three decades and includes a section of new poems that are among his finest.
Cold missiles and a rain
of embers accompany the men
who slide like shadows into the city
faces mud-smeared
stones for teeth no eyes
who slit the throats of everyone
they encounter until breaking down
my door they drag me into the darkness
that floods the corridor
and lock me in an icy chamber
—from "THE LAST HOURS OF LAóDIKê, SISTER OF HEKTOR"