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Description
Acclaimed poet and translator Dan Beachy-Quick offers this newest addition to the Seedbank series: a warm, vivid rendering of the earliest Greek intellects, inviting us to reconsider writing, and thinking, as a way of living meaningfully in the world. "We have lost our sense of thinking as the experience that keeps us in the world," writes Beachy-Quick, and the figures rendered in The Thinking Root--Heraclitus, Anaximander, Empedocles, Parmenides, and others--are among the first examples we have in Western civilization of thinkers who used writing as to record their impressions of a world where intuition and observation, and spirit and nature, have yet to be estranged. In these pages, we find clear-eyed ideas searching for shapes and forms with which to order the world, and to reveal our life in flux. Drawn from "words that think," these ancient Greek texts are fresh and alive in the hands of Beachy-Quick, who translates with the empathy of one who knows that "a word is its own form of life." In aphorisms, axioms, vignettes, and anecdotes, these first theories of the world articulate a relationship to the world that precedes our story of its making, a world where "the beginning and the end are in common." A remarkable collection from one of our most accomplished poets, The Thinking Root renders a primary apprehension of life amidst life, a vision that echoes our gaze upon the stars.
Product Details
| Publisher | Milkweed Editions |
| Publish Date | April 11, 2023 |
| Pages | 128 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Paperback / softback |
| EAN/UPC | 9781571315441 |
| Dimensions | 8.4 X 5.5 X 0.5 inches | 0.5 pounds |
About the Author
Dan Beachy-Quick is the translator of The Thinking Root and Stone-Garland, both from ancient Greek. He is also the author of two works of creative nonfiction, Of Song and Silence and The Whaler's Dictionary, as well as nine collections of poems, one novel, and a monograph on the work of John Keats. His work has been a winner of the Colorado Book Award, a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Prize and the PEN/USA Literary Award in Poetry, longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry, and included in the Best American Poetry anthology. The recipient of a Lannan Foundation residency, his work has been supported by the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard University and the Guggenheim Foundation. He is a University Distinguished Teaching Scholar at Colorado State University, where he serves in the English department and teaches in the MFA program in creative writing.
Reviews
Praise for The Thinking Root
"The Thinking Root offers so much to ponder and savor."--Rain Taxi Review of Books
"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
"The Thinking Root offers so much to ponder and savor."--Rain Taxi Review of Books
"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
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