The poet Paul Celan noted that, in his view of language, thinking and thanking are cognate, innately connected in their roots and connotations. Elements & Offerings, a new collection of poems by Dan Beachy-Quick, is a book-length poetic investigation of that hope—that to think is to learn to thank; that to thank is to learn to think. The first two sections seek a way to work toward poetic origins, taking inspiration from the alphabet, first philosophy, grammar, a...

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 ...

What is it to write a poem? What work do words do when placed with care and vision into the intensely charged space of poetic effort? How to Draw a Circle does not seek to answer those questions, but to encounter them as fully and honestly as one can. The thread running through the essays is an ongoing investigation into poetry as an epistemological experiment, one which binds the imagination to the worldly, and trusts that creative endeavor is a form of participation in the ongoi...

From "one of America's most significant young poets" (Lyn Hejinian), an exceptional book of nonfiction and fables that provides a walking tour of the creative mind.In Wonderful Investigations, Dan Beachy-Quick broaches "a hazy line, a faulty boundary" between our daily world and one rich with wonder; a magical world in which, through his work as a writer, he participates with a singular combination of critical intelligence and lyricism. Touching on the wor...

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 cri...

“A first novel of sorts that promises to be an engaging study of memory, storytelling, and coming of age.” —Library Journal Daniel is pursued by stories. His father, in thrall to a myth, has disappeared; his mother and sister, too; and Lydia, his lover, leaves him and the novel he cannot finish for quantum mechanics, the place where theory tells tales about the real. And then there is Pearl, the girl beneath the floorboards, whose adventures hum alongside Daniel’s own. In this contemporary...

The acclaimed poet finds many-hued complexity within America's divided black-and-white society in this 2012 National Poetry Series–winning collection.American attitudes and perceptions—of tragedies, major events, each other—are often segregated into two camps by a politicized, racially divided "Color Line." But in this award-winning poetry collection, Ed Pavlic explores the nonlinear aspects of our cultural divide. Where, he asks, is the Color Line in the mind, in t...

A collection of essays highlighting the pervasive, yet often unacknowledged, role of Romantic poetry and poetics on modern and contemporary innovative poetry.Literary history generally locates the primary movement toward poetic innovation in twentieth-century modernism, an impulse carried out against a supposedly enervated “late-Romantic” poetry of the nineteenth century. The original essays in Active Romanticism challenge this interpretation by t...

Acclaimed poet and translator Dan Beachy-Quick offers this newest addition to the Seedbank series: a warm, vivid rendering of the earliest Greek intellects, inviting us to reconsider writing, and thinking, as a way of living meaningfully in the world."We have lost our sense of thinking as the experience that keeps us in the world," writes Beachy-Quick, and the figures rendered in The Thinking Root—Heraclitus, Anaximander, Empedocles, Parmenides, a...

"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 s...