Todd Mercer lives in Bellaire. He is the winner of the 2006 William Shaw Prize for Poetry. Interlochen instructor Michael Delp praises the poems in Box of Echoes as “chunks of a real world, spliced into language that defies the sometimes true notion that poets are eyeless newts who sit in tiny rooms listening to their hair falling out, while trying to manufacture the truth. Mercer has been some places and these poems tell the real truth.”