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“As part of the publisher’s 'Seedbank' series, aiming to preserve endangered literatures, the poet Beachy-Quick offers a modern gloss on six ancient Greeks.”—New York Times Book Review, “New & Noteworthy Poetry” Anthology. The Greek origins of the word gesture at a bouquet, a garland; “a flower-logic, a petal-theory, a blossom-word.” In Stone-Garland, Dan Beachy-Quick brings the term back to its roots, linking together the lives and words of six singular ancient Greeks. Simonides: honest servant to patrons. Anacreon: lustful singer, living on in the work of his acolytes. Archilochus: cruel critic, beloved of the Muses. Alcman: who took birds as his teachers. Theognis: chronic...
"The poems that comprise Variations on Dawn and Dusk are best considered as a single inquiry broken into discrete parts--they don't build exactly one upon another, they aren't a progressive series, but each is a meditation gathered around fundamental points of concern: light, dark, sky, cloud, faith, doubt, thought, care, memory, dust, and more. The project as a whole is meant as an imitation of so deep it becomes a participation in Robert Irwin's untitled (dawn to dusk) (2016), a permanent installation at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, TX"--
"In this illuminating collection of prose, Dan Beachy-Quick broaches "a hazy line, a faulty boundary" between our daily world, "where we who have appetites must fill our mouths, we who have thoughts must fill our minds," and another side, "within the world and beyond it, where appetite isn't to be sated, where desire is not to be fulfilled, and where thoughts refuse to lead to knowledge." Touching on the works of Emerson, Thoreau, and Proust, among others, Beachy-Quick explores the problem of duality -- the separation of the mind and body, word and referent, intelligence and mystery -- striving throughout to overcome this false separation, and to celebrate the notion that "wonder is the fact that the world has never ceased to be real." Combining a rich critical intelligence and the lyricism that has made him "one of America's most significant young poets" (Lyn Hejinian), Wonderful Investigations is a wonder unto itself"--Front flap.
Simultaneously funny and frightful, Srikanth Reddy's Underworld Lit is a multiverse quest through various cultures' realms of the dead. Couched in a literature professor's daily mishaps with family life and his sudden reckoning with mortality, this adventurous serial prose poem moves from the college classroom to the oncologist's office to the mythic underworlds of Mayan civilization, the ancient Egyptian place of judgment and rebirth, the infernal court of Qing dynasty China, and beyond—testing readers along with the way with diabolically demanding quizzes. It unsettles our sense of home as it ferries us back and forth across cultures, languages, epochs, and the shifting border between the living and the dead.
Musings on joy and suffering, midlife and meaning, by a National Book Award–nominated poet and essayist praised for his “fine ear” (Publishers Weekly). Midway through the journey of his life, Dan Beachy-Quick found himself without a path, unsure how to live well. Of Silence and Song follows him on his resulting classical search for meaning in the world and in his particular, quiet life. In essays, fragments, marginalia, images, travel writing, and poetry, Beachy-Quick traces his relationships and identities. As father and husband. As teacher and student. As citizen and scholar. And as poet and reader, wondering at the potential and limits of literature. Of Silence and Song finds its in...
"Building upon the visceral and conceptual fascinations of Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay "Circles," these poems trace patterned tensions to connections in existence on many levels, from molecular to millennial"--P. [4] of cover.
The Romantic poet John Keats, considered by many as one of the greatest poets in the English language, has long been the subject of attention from scholars who seek to understand him and poets who seek to emulate him. Bridging these impulses, A Brighter Word Than Bright is neither historical biography nor scholarly study, but instead a biography of Keats’s poetic imagination. Here the noted poet Dan Beachy-Quick enters into Keats’s writing—both his letters and his poems—not to critique or judge, not to claim or argue, but to embrace the passion and quickness of his poetry and engage the aesthetic difficulties with which Keats grappled. Combining a set of biographical portraits that p...
Poetry. Describing his new book as "an intimate primer to a history of literary epochs," Dan Beachy-Quick summons his belief that tradition and experiment are mutually embracing, and his curiosity about humble forms of song and rhyme as figures of enchantment that induce the most primal modes of perception. GENTLESSNESS is the work of a poetic archaeologist who finds relict layers of meaning still alive in traditional measures and forms. "By means both gentle and less than gentle, these poems make space for us to consider our ideas of ourselves, of the divine, of our cultural and literary inheritances, and the language we use to create and hold them... Uncannily beautiful."--Mary Szybist "These are lines to be read in all the stillness you can find."--Jean Valentine
Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Dan Beachy-Quick and Matthew Goulish set up a room in Marcel Proust's house of memory in which poetry and prose could enact a dialogue, structured as a parallel weave, on several subjects from Proust's novel, as a way of extending their experience of reading. They selected three aspects or elements from Proust's work and wrote in response to them, on alternating pages that also responded to what the other had written. These were the first book, Swann's Way; the in/famous "long sentence" in Sodom and Gomorrah; and the idea/concept of captivity as marked in the moment in The Captive when the narrator watches Albertine as she sleeps. The result, on face-to-face page...
First published in 1977, Ronald Johnson's RADI OS revises the first four books of Paradise Lost by excising words, discovering a modern and visionary poem within the seventeenth-century text. As the author explains, "To etch is 'to cut away, ' and each page, as in Blake's concept of a book, is a single picture." With God and Satan crossed out, RADI OS reduces Milton's Baroque poem to elemental forces. In this retelling of the Fall, song precipitates from chaos, sight from fire: "in the shape / as of / above the / rose / through / rose / rising / the radiant sun. -- Contracubierta.