Wonderful Investigations

Over the course of five critically acclaimed books?including a compelling meditation on Moby Dick?Dan Beachy-Quick has established himself as ?one of America’s most significant young poets” (Lyn Hejinian). With Wonderful Investigations he cements his reputation by making a compelling new case for the role of the writer and thinker in the natural world.

Comprised of four essays, three meditations, and four tales, Wonderful Investigations revolves around Beachy-Quick’s central concern: that the experience of wonder, somehow, has been lost to us. Touching on the work Emerson, Thoreau, Eliot, Proust, and Greek Mythology, among others, Beachy-Quick 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 separation and celebrate the idea that ?wonder is the fact that the world has never ceased to be real.”

?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 (A Whaler's Dictionary)

Dan Beachy-Quick is the author of four acclaimed collections of poems: North True South Bright (Alice James, 2003), Spell (Ahsahta, 2004), Mulberry (Tupelo, 2006), and, most recently, This Nest, Swift Passerine (Tupelo, 2009). In 2008, Milkweed Editions published his first work of nonfiction, A Whaler’s Dictionary. He completed his MFA in poetry at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation residency among many other honors. Beachy-Quick previously taught in the Writing Program at the School of Art Institute of Chicago, and is currently an associate professor of English at Colorado State University.