Description
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
Author Bio
Dan Beachy-Quick is the author, most recently, of a collection of essays, fragments, and poems, Of Silence & Song (Milkweed, 2017). He has written six books of poetry, GENTLESSNESS, CIRCLE'S APPRENTICE, North True South Bright, SPELL, Mulberry, and THIS NEST, SWIFT PASSERINE, six chapbooks, Shields & Shards & Stitches & Songs, Apology for the Book of Creatures, Overtakelessness, Heroisms, Canto and Mobius Crowns (the latter two both written in collaboration with the poet Srikanth Reddy), a book of interlinked essays on Moby-Dick, A Whaler's Dictionary, as well as a collection of essays, meditations and tales, Wonderful Investigations. Reddy and Beachy-Quick's collaboration has recently been released as a full-length collection, CONVERSITIES, and he has also collaborated with the essayist and performance artist Matthew Goulish on Work From Memory. In 2013, University of Iowa Press published a monograph on John Keats in their Muse Series (editor Robert D. Richardson) titled A Brighter Word Than Bright: Keats at Work, and Coffee House Press published his first novel, An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky. He is a contributing editor for the journals A Public Space and West Branch. After graduating from the University of Denver, he attended the Iowa Writer's Workshop. He has taught at Grinnell College, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is currently teaching in the MFA Writing Program at Colorado State University. His work has been a winner of the Colorado Book Award, and has been a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Prize, and the PEN/USA Literary Award in Poetry. He is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation residency, and taught as Visiting Faculty at the Iowa Writer's Workshop in spring 2010. He was one of two Monfort Professors at CSU for 2013-2015, and has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Creative Fellow of the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard University.
Author City: FORT COLLINS, CO USA