gentlessness

$19.95

by Dan Beachy-Quick

Describing his new book as “an intimate primer to a history of literary epochs,” Dan Beachy-Quick summons his belief that tradition and experiment are mutually embracing, and his curiosity about humble forms of song and rhyme as figures of enchantment that induce the most primal modes of perception. gentlessness is the work of a poetic archaeologist who finds relict layers of meaning still alive in traditional measures and forms.

by Dan Beachy-Quick

Describing his new book as “an intimate primer to a history of literary epochs,” Dan Beachy-Quick summons his belief that tradition and experiment are mutually embracing, and his curiosity about humble forms of song and rhyme as figures of enchantment that induce the most primal modes of perception. gentlessness is the work of a poetic archaeologist who finds relict layers of meaning still alive in traditional measures and forms.

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About the Author

Author or co-author of fourteen books of poetry, exploratory prose, and fiction, Dan Beachy-Quick’s previous Tupelo volumes are Mulberry (2006), This Nest, Swift Passerine (2009), and Circle’s Apprentice (2011). His work has been supported by the Lannan Foundation, and he has taught at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Colorado State University. He lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, with his family.

Advanced Praise

“Summer Poetry Reads” in the Boston Review

“Beachy-Quick (Circle’s Apprentice) guides the reader on a startlingly engaged and astute trip through the history of Western poetic form and voice, from the pre-classical age through modernism. Defining ‘gentlessness’ as ‘a word/ to describe that/ which must deny itself/ to exist./ …a word I made up/ to describe/ to myself/ myself and other fields,’ Beachy-Quick moves through the ‘literary epochs’ that have preceded our own, beginning with the primitive, stripped-down ‘monadism: a proem’ before running through elements of the Homeric epics and Platonic dualisms in ‘heroisms.’ The ‘puritanisms’ section features instructions and aphorisms for living in beauty, while in ‘overtakeslessness’ he considers work, fear, and W.C. Williams’s ‘The Red Wheelbarrow.’ He switches gears in ‘romanticisms,’ elevating his language in a set of sonnets that somehow manages to reference Duchamp (‘I saw the nude bride lean back in the grass,/ Legs askance, one hand holding above her head/ A lantern’), and he echoes Pound and Eliot in the final section, ‘modernisms.’ Even the sonnets show a serious, scholarly, yet playful resolve to be faithful to their own history. Beachy-Quick’s understated humor, intelligence, and regard for big ideas shine through the whole of Western poetic history, shaped by his postmodern (and occasionally ironic and self-deprecating) voice. Such an accomplishment is rarely achieved with this much grace.” — Publishers Weekly STARRED review

“By means both gentle and less than gentle, these poems make space for us to consider our ideas of ourselves, of the divine, of our cultural and literary inheritances, and the language we use to create and hold them.… Uncannily beautiful.” — Mary Szybist

“These are lines to be read in all the stillness you can find.” — Jean Valentine

Format: paperback
ISBN: 978-1-936797-57-8