Exploring themes of loss and the transformative power of storytelling, this contemporary tale intertwines profound emotional depth with a rich narrative structure. Drawing inspiration from both Tree of Life and In Search of Lost Time, it delves into the complexities of human experience, inviting readers to reflect on memory and connection through its intricate storytelling.
Exploring themes like myth, language, and consciousness, this unique work draws inspiration from Ishmael's "Cetalogical Dictionary." It features cross-referential entries that range from "Accuracy" to "Wound" and "Adam" to "Void," creating a rich tapestry of ideas related to Melville's masterpiece. The book serves as an immersive artistic experience, reflecting a deep engagement with one of the greatest novels in English literature, making it a mesmerizing and original contribution to literary discourse.
Touching on the works of Emerson, Thoreau, Proust, and Plato, among others, this title outlines the problem of duality in modern thought - the separation of the mind and body, word and referent, intelligence and mystery, human and natural - and makes the case for a fuller kind of nature poetry, one that strives to overcome this false separation.
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, and others--are among the first examples we have in Western civilization of thinkers who used writing as to record their impressions of a world where intuition and observation, and spirit and nature, have yet to be estranged. In these pages, we find clear-eyed ideas searching for shapes and forms with which to order the world, and to reveal our life in flux. Drawn from "words that think," these ancient Greek texts are fresh and alive in the hands of Beachy-Quick, who translates with the empathy of one who knows that "a word is its own form of life." In aphorisms, axioms, vignettes, and anecdotes, these first theories of the world articulate a relationship to the world that precedes our story of its making, a world where "the beginning and the end are in common." A remarkable collection from one of our most accomplished poets, The Thinking Root renders a primary apprehension of life amidst life, a vision that echoes our gaze upon the stars.
Focusing on the connections between Romanticism and modern poetic innovation, this collection of essays argues against the notion of a stark divide between the two. It explores how the radicalism of Romantic poetry has influenced experimental movements from the late nineteenth century to contemporary times, revealing a continuity that reshapes our understanding of literary history. Through this lens, the book reexamines the evolution of poetry and its political implications, offering a fresh perspective on the development of poetic forms.
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 critique or judge, not to claim or argue, but to embrace the passion and quickness of his poetry and engage the aesthetic difficulties with which Keats grappled. Combining a set of biographical portraits that place symbolic pressure on key moments in Keats’s life with a chronological examination of the development of Keats-as-poet through his poems and letters, Beachy-Quick explores the growth of the young man’s poetic imagination during the years of his writing life, from 1816 to 1820. A Brighter Word Than Bright aims to enter the poems and the mind that wrote them, to explore and mine Keats’s poetic concerns and ambitions. It is a mimetic tribute to the poet’s life and work, a brilliant enactment that is also a thoughtful consideration.
The artist Roni Horn's permanent installation in Iceland, Library of Water, consists of floor-to-ceiling cylinders filled with water-melted ice from all of Iceland's twenty-four glaciers. These poems are inspired by this simultaneous act of attention to crisis and preservation against it. The "library" of these poems imagines each letter of the alphabet as its own peculiar archive, part deeply personal, part radically in common. Each poem seeks to catalog a set of associations embedded in the memories, experiences, and curious resonances each letter evokes. The urgency underlying the project-not exactly ecological, but not exactly not-lurks in that vague but omnipresent sense of oblivion's inevitability. This is tied to the ancient Greek sense of ???????, truth as that which shines out of actual being, and the ???? hidden in that same word, that oblivion, that forgetting-that melting away as of ice into water and water into air-that abides in what truth we know.
From one of the preeminent American visionaries of our moment (G. C. Waldrep), a singular reflection on living well in a time of distraction and despair
"The poems that comprise Variations on Dawn and Dusk are best considered as a single inquiry broken into discrete parts--they don't build exactly one upon another, they aren't a progressive series, but each is a meditation gathered around fundamental points of concern: light, dark, sky, cloud, faith, doubt, thought, care, memory, dust, and more. The project as a whole is meant as an imitation of so deep it becomes a participation in Robert Irwin's untitled (dawn to dusk) (2016), a permanent installation at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, TX"--