About this item
Midway through the journey of his life, Dan Beachy-Quick found himself without a path, unsure how to live well. Of Silence and Song follows him on his resulting classical search for meaning in the world and in his particular, quiet life. In essays, fragments, marginalia, images, travel writing, and poetry, Beachy-Quick traces his relationships and identities. As father and husband. As teacher and student. As citizen and scholar. And as poet and reader, wondering at the potential and limits of literature. Of Silence and Song finds its inferno -- and its paradise -- in moments both historically vast and nakedly intimate. Hell: disappearing bees, James Eagan Holmes, Columbine, and the persistent, unforgivable crime of slavery. And redemption: in the art of Marcel Duchamp, the pressed flowers in Emily Dickinson's Bible, and long walks with his youngest daughter.
About the Author
Dan Beachy-Quick is the author of five books of poetry, Circle's Apprentice, North True South Bright, Spell, Mulberry, and This Nest, Swift Passerine, five chapbooks, Apology for the Book of Creatures, Overtakelesness, Heroisms, Canto and Mobius Crowns (the latter two both written in collaboration with the poet Srikanth Reddy) , a book of interlinked essays on Moby-Dick, A Whaler's Dictionary, as well as a collection of essays, meditations and tales, Wonderful Investigations. Reddy and Beachy-Quick's collaboration has recently been released as a full-length collection, Conversities, and he has also collaborated with the essayist and performance artist Matthew Goulish on Work From Memory. In 2013, University of Iowa Press will eb publishing a monograph on John Keats in their Muse Series (editor Richard Roberston) titled A Brighter Word Than Bright: Keats at Work, and Coffee House Press will be publishing his first novel, An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky. He is a contributing editor for the journals A Public Space, Dear Navigator, West Branch and Tupelo Quarterly, as well as serving on the board for Squircle Press. After graduating from the University of Denver, he attended the Iowa Writer's Workshop. He has taught at Grinnell College, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is currently teaching in the MFA Writing Program at Colorado State University. His work has been a winner of the Colorado Book Award, and has been a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Prize, and the PEN/USA Literary Award in Poetry. He is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation residency, and taught as Visiting Faculty at the Iowa Writer's Workshop in spring 2010. He is currently one of two Monfort Professors at CSU for 2013-2015.
