This book reveals how conflicting worldviews are at the root of public controversies on policy and trade issues. It highlights the particularly controversial disputes at the level of the World Trade Organization in the case of regulating beef-hormones and GMOs, aiming to show how negotiators of international agreements, members of dispute settlement bodies, and policy makers in general could have recourse to concepts of other disciplines such as epistemology and philosophy in order to address deadlocked legal disputes. Ultimately, the book is a manifesto for independent and critical research.

This book reveals how conflicting worldviews are at the root of public controversies on policy and trade issues. It highlights the particularly controversial disputes at the level of the World Trade Organization in the case of regulating beef-hormones and GMOs, aiming to show how negotiators of international agreements, members of dispute settlement bodies, and policy makers in general could have recourse to concepts of other disciplines such as epistemology and philosophy in order to address deadlocked legal disputes. Ultimately, the book is a manifesto for independent and critical research.

A Notebook of Prose and Poems

When Fictions from the Self, Michael Burkard's previous collection of poetry was published, The Bloomsbury Review noted: "A book such as this can be a resonant reminder of what it is like to esteem poetry over all other human speech."

In this new book Burkard continues his associative method of allowing the reader to follow his movement of dream and memory, psychology and color. Written as a notebook, My Secret Boat is a collage of stories, poems, dreams, and sketches. Among Burkard's subjects are childhood, the sea, family, alcoholism, love. We follow the narrator on a journey as he explores the images, characters, and incidents from his past. Identities merge and even become contrary.

In lyrical tones in which no one moment is more serious or less comic than another, presences and secrets are celebrated and illuminated by both animate and inanimate worlds. The sun, the moon, a brook, blackbirds, lanterns, boats have information or gifts or sources for us. Finally, each affirms the anonymous powers of the inner life.

"Burkard's carefully reduced stock of images is powerful: the sea, a laterns, snow, rain and ghosts. . . . The speaker lends a voluminous consciousness to us that sympathetic readers will not soon forget."—Publishers Weekly

Poems explore a variety of themes including love, time, and loneliness.