The Thinking Root

Praise for Stone-Garland 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 Sixth-century BCE Greek lyric poets Alcman, Theognis, Simonides, Anacreon/Anacreonata, Archilochus, and Callimachus are beautifully translated by Beachy-Quick in this memorable and edifying collection, which presents excavated fragments meant to be sung or recited to music . . . This skillfully achieved collection is a necessary contribution to ancient translation. -Publishers Weekly (starred review) [A] thoughtfully collected anthology of poems of the ancients-poems that despite their age sing with a fresh vibrancy. Beachy-Quick is both translator and guide through the stone ruins and his insightful and beautiful introductions to each poet are a joy in and of themselves. Part of Milkweed's Seedbank Series that aims to preserve and bring ancient, historical, and contemporary works from cultures around the world to readers, Stone-Garland is a collection to cherish. -Book Riot, Best Fall 2020 Books in Translation To me, every book by Beachy-Quick feels like a beacon amid the chaos of contemporary life . . . [offering] new coordinates to triangulate one's uncertain position in deep time. -Srikanth Reddy, BOMB Magazine Beachy-Quick presents an inspired and intricately-constructed collection . . . [an] enchanting, death-defying project. -Poetry Daily Beautiful and understated . . . Beachy-Quick's translations lean into the elegiac possibilities of these poems and poets. . . . We grow old, as do our voices; we die; the best we can hope for is that the songs we sing will be picked up by others, turned into new forms, given new life, and that, for a moment, something of us might live again. -Words Without Borders Praise for Of Silence and Song Responding to the silence from which poetry arises, 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 beanfields 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, 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, author of Proxies It's an exciting thing when a writer of real originality and scope discovers a form that both focuses and liberates his gift. 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, author of My Bright Abyss 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, 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 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 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, 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 Infidel Poetics 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 My Life 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