This Nest, Swift Passerine [Paperback]

Dan Beachy-Quick (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 15, 2009

One of America's most acclaimed younger poets entwines original and scavenged texts, lyric fragment and lyric song, to make a new form -- this book -- from wild metaphor. Dan Beachy-Quick has said that he sees the work of poetry (reading and writing) as parallel patterns. Language is a nest where the minds of poet and reader can dwell. A migratory bird's nest also offers a place of dwelling in the pauses between astounding miles of flight. A nest is made of both natural and artificial, happenstance materials (grass and twigs, but also grocery lists, threads from clothing, detritus from humans, literally what is found by the side of the road), and likewise the poem in this book has been made from gatherings and improvisations and unexpected opportunities, a shapely motley.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Beachy-Quick relies on [a] post-structuralist axiom: reading is a collaborative endeavor in which writer and reader reciprocally produce a plurality of meanings. . . . Many ostensible poet-reader collaborations turn out to be exercises in reader-hating obscurity, hipper-than-thou insouciance, or faux-intimate gestures that invite vague recognition only to degenerate into outright confusion. Beachy-Quick avoids these pitfalls with a tone of almost painful earnestness and gentle exhortation. . . . Inviting the reader into a sacred readerly space, Beachy-Quick tries to modulate the sheer force of a deluge of reference. . . . What makes this cascade of high-cultural citation tolerable and even pleasing is the twin-ing process itself--a poetics of the gerund. The syntactic motor of the book is the present participle as thing, action, and motion as form. The result is a poetic universe abuzz with `humming,' `cawing,' `echoing,' `reading,' `roaming,' `embracing,' and thinking.' . . . Beachy-Quick has assimilated the terms of postmodern poetics without the corrosive irony that debilitates so many poets of his generation, and the result conveys a generosity of spirit and of utterance for which the reader can be very grateful. He is impressed by beauty, intimate in address. He has a gift for prose syntax and traditional poetic musicality, and he is not afraid to use either of them--or of sounding `literary.'" --B.K. Fischer in The Boston Review, November-December 2009 B.K. Fischer in Boston Review, November-December 2009

About the Author

Chicago born, Dan Beachy-Quick grew up in Colorado and upstate New York. He attended Hamilton College, the University of Denver and the Iowa Writer's Workshop. For two years he worked with autistic children, which left an indelible mark on his sense of language and (im)possibility in communication. He has taught writing at the School of Art Institute of Chicago, and currently he is an assistant professor of English at Colorado State University. Beachy-Quick is the author of three previous books of poems, NORTH TRUE SOUTH BRIGHT (Alice James, 2003), SPELL (Ahsahta, 2004), and MULBERRY (Tupelo, 2006); of the chapbooks MOBIUS CROWNS (with Srikanth Reddy: P-Queue, 2008) and APOLOGY FOR THE BOOK OF CREATURES (Ahsahta, 2008); and a book of essays, A WHALER'S DICTIONARY (Graywolf, 2008).

Product Details

• Paperback: 72 pages
• Publisher: Tupelo Press; First Edition edition (April 15, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1932195602
• ISBN-13: 978-1932195606
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.8 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #311,938 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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