FRONT FLAP:

“If there is a wish in this book, it is merely this: That through the whole, as per Plato’s definition of a line, is a ‘point that flows,’ and that the reader may find that point and follow it as it flows toward that edge where the margin becomes a center, and the end of the book the hazy border to the wonder-world.” —from the Preface

In this illuminating collection of prose, Dan Beachy-Quick broaches “a hazy line, a faulty boundary” between our daily world, “where we who have appetites must fill our mouths, we who have thoughts must fill our minds,” and another side, “within the world and beyond it, where appetite isn’t to be sated, where desire is not to be fulfilled, and where thoughts refuse to lead to knowledge.” Touching on the work of Emerson, Thoreau, and Proust, among others, Beachy-Quick explores the problem of duality—the separation of the mind and body, word and referent, intelligence and mystery—striving throughout to overcome this false separation, and to celebrate the notion that “wonder is the fact that the world has never ceased to be real.”

Combining a rich critical intelligence and the lyricism that has made him one of “one of America’s most significant young poets” (Lyn Hejinian), Wonderful Investigations is a wonder unto itself.


BACK FLAP:

Dan Beachy-Quick is the author of five collections of poems, most recently Circle’s Apprentice. A Whaler’s Dictionary, his celebrated collection of meditations on Melville’s Moby-Dick, appeared from Milkweed Editions in 2008. Beachy-Quick teaches at Colorado State University, and lives in Fort Collins.

Cover design: Gretchen Achilles/Wavetrap Design
Cover photo: Abelardo Morrell
Author Photo: Sergio Vucci

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.