A Whaler's Dictionary

Author's Bio:

Dan Beachy-Quick is one of the most acclaimed young poets in America today. He is the author of three collections of poems: Mulberry (Tupelo Press, 2006), Spell (Ahsata Press, 2004), and North True South Bright (Alice James Books, 2003). Mulberry was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for poetry. His poems, criticism, and essays have been widely published in magazines and reviews, and frequently anthologized. A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, Dan Beachy-Quick is an Associate Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at Colorado State University. He lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, with his wife and daughter.

Quotes:

“This is a rich, profound, fascinating book, the kind that widens the margins of everything we read, making room for new observations, more creative relationships all around: writer/reader, person/book, literature/life.”

—Los Angeles Times

“Wounded by a book, wounded by the force of idolatrous speech in Moby-Dick, Dan Beachy-Quick has mounted a kind of folly, a nautilus, enclosing the furtive wall of his own lyric sensibility. A Whaler's Dictionary reminds us why poets must sometimes measure their gifts against the calculus of prose, and why criticism by poets, unlike academic arguments, sometimes produces a flame which stands the test of time.”

—Daniel Tiffany, author of Toy Medium and Puppet Wardrobe

“This is a major work on the charged relationship that can come into being between text and reader, written by one of America’s most significant young poets.”

—Lyn Hejinian, author of Saga / Circus and The Fatalist

“Submerged within Moby-Dick lurks an unfinished dictionary, specific to the science and art of whaling. Ishmael attempts to classify and define every whale a whaler may encounter. The effort is more touching than pedantic. Whales, of course, pose a great problem to the would-be lexicographer: they are always diving down. One might as well define evanescence by noting the horizon line.
A Whaler’s Dictionary does not finish Ishmael’s cetalogical endeavor—it simply repeats the failure in a different guise.”

—Dan Beachy-Quick, on writing A Whaler’s Dictionary