Dan Beachy-Quick is the author of A Whaler’s Dictionary, a book of interlinked essays on Moby-Dick; Wonderful Investigations, a collection of essays, meditations, and tales; and, most recently, Of Silence and Song, a collection of fragments, marginalia, travel writing, and poetry. He is also the author of six collections of poems, a novel, and other projects. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard University, Beachy-Quick has also received the Colorado Book Award and has been a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Prize and the PEN/USA Literary Award in Poetry. He directs the MFA program at Colorado State University and lives in Fort Collins.
Midway through the journey of his life, Dan Beachy-Quick found himself without a path, unsure how to live well. This collection of essays, fragments, marginalia, images, travel writing, and poetry follows him through the result: a classical search for meaning in the world and in his particular, quiet life.
Touching on the works of Emerson, Thoreau, Proust, and Plato, among others, this collection of nonfiction and fables provides a walking tour of the creative mind. This is a rich investigation of what it means to think, read, write, and learn, celebrating the notion that our daily world is rich with wonder.
Taking its inspiration—and, for that matter, its form—from Ishmael’s abandoned “Cetological Dictionary” in Moby-Dick, this extraordinary, highly original work brings meditations on myth, representation, language, nature, consciousness, and notions of spiritual quest into constantly new relations. From “Accuracy” to “Wound,” from “Adam” to “Void,” and from “Babel” to “Silence,” the cross-referential, highly associative entries make up an utterly singular work of art.
