Michael Sowder's The Empty Boat explores the spiritual and aesthetic dimensions of the human relationship to the natural world, asking how nature speaks to us and what wisdom and solace it may offer the tragic aspects of our lives.

Michael Sowder is the author of the T. S. Eliot Prize-winning book, The Empty Boat and two chapbook collections, A Calendar of Crows and Cafe Midnight. He also wrote about Walt Whitman’s poetry in Whitman’s Ecstatic Union. In addition to writing poetry, Sowder writes creative nonfiction about the human relationship to the natural world, and about Buddhism, Hinduism, Christian Mysticism. His essays have appeared in Shambhala Sun, The Wasatch Journal, The Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, and many other venues. Sowder is associate professor of English and adjunct professor of Religious Studies at Utah State Univeristy. He is a meditation teacher in the Cache Valley Buddhist Sangha and the Amrita Sangha for Integral Spirituality, of Cache Valley, Logan, Utah.