Stone-Garland

Praise for Of Song and Silence Responding to the silence from which poetry arises, Dan Beachy-Quick is not afraid to follow the call of thought, wherever it may lead. This book situates itself beyond the noise of the times. --Robert Pogue Harrison, author of Gardens: An Essay on the Human You read here that, etymologically, 'consider' means 'to examine the stars. To draw the connections between the distant points.' If that is so, then Of Silence and Song is a clear night sky full of constellations. From the bean fields that Pythagoras would not enter to the verses of her Bible that Dickinson cut out, from his daughter Iris's fear of the dark to the 'tenth Muse seldom mentioned, ' from here to heliopause, Dan Beachy-Quick crosses great expanses in this book-length, acutely human consideration, flickering in the hunch that 'question and answer are the same thing--one. . . just the disappearance of the other.' --Brian Blanchfield It's an exciting thing when a writer of real originality and scope discovers a form that both focuses and liberates his gift. Dan Beachy-Quick is such a writer, and Of Silence and Song is such a book. One doesn't think to use the word 'ennobling' of many works of contemporary art, but this one is. --Christian Wiman Praise for Wonderful Investigations Wonderful Investigations juxtaposes four essays with three 'meditations' and four fable-like 'tales' to trace the tension between mind and body, between our inner and our outer lives. A poet, Dan Beachy-Quick is terrific with an image and relies on antecedents here from Plato to Thoreau to give his work a context and a depth. --Los Angeles Times Wonderful Investigations is a model of intense observation, of a mind reaching out as far as it can. Always Dan Beachy-Quick seems to write in metaphor, returning to the process of wonder, and why it's so necessary, and then to the failure of language and poetry to ever truly take us where we want to go. . . . His reader cannot help but feel the same desire for that hazy line--cannot help but want to reach for it as well. --Ploughshares This is a book about reading. It offers the kinds of insights into the act that most of us never stop to indulge in, and for that we are eternally grateful. . . . The idea that reading offers a dream world, a parallel one, is familiar. But Dan Beachy-Quick takes this a step farther. Reading before sleep, reading books to children before they go to sleep, is a way to slide gently through a middle place and into forgetting. --Los Angeles Review of Books Praise for A Whaler's Dictionary Essayistic, inventive, and frequently brilliant. --Poetry Foundation 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 A Whaler's Dictionary manages to function as an oddly ideal work of criticism, breathing new life into Moby-Dick and showing how the novel subsists as an intricately living thing. --Virginia Quarterly Review