Wonderful Investigations
Essays, Meditations, Tales
From “one of America’s most significant young poets” (Lyn Hejinian), an exceptional book of nonfiction and fables that provides a walking tour of the creative mind.
In Wonderful Investigations, Dan Beachy-Quick broaches “a hazy line, a faulty boundary” between our daily world and one rich with wonder; a magical world in which, through his work as a writer, he participates with a singular combination of critical intelligence and lyricism. Touching on the works of Emerson, Thoreau, Proust, and Plato, 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 false separation, and to celebrate the notion that “wonder is the fact that the world has never ceased to be real.
Luminous, generous, and unceasingly curious, Wonderful Investigations is a rich investigation of what it means to think, read, write, and learn.
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.
