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Tupelo PressThis Nest, Swift Passerine
 Photo by Sergio Vucci
$16.95
Paperback Original ISBN: 978-1-932195-60-6 SynopsisOne of America’s most acclaimed younger poets entwines original and scavenged texts, lyric fragment and lyric song, to make a new form—this book—from wild metaphor.A passerine is a bird of the taxonomic order Passeriformes, often called “songbirds” or “perching birds.” The passerines are among the most diverse of terrestrial vertebrates, and in his book-length canticle—both aria and elegy—the poet sings like a modern-day St. Francis to the wonder of creation in its splendor and peril. The form of this book lovingly builds a dwelling, avowal by vowel—a breathy mix of lyrical citation and citational lyric annunciation—tuned open, sonically alive, and homing in to the heart of song.—Peter Gizzi This complex book has the fineness of etching, with firm, accurate lines placed close to each other so that one moves slowly along the passages and intensities . . . .—Bin Ramke A concatenation of sound and sense, of science and swoon, Dan Beachy-Quick writes lines of thought and fracture into an anarchy of form. Somewhere between chaos and its echo, . . . a love letter to every breathing creature.—Kazim Ali ReviewsRead a perceptive review by Andrew Wessels of Dan Beachy-Quick’s new book, This Nest, Swift PasserineDan Beachy-Quick’s newest book This Nest, Swift Passerine (Tupelo, 2009), and his recent book of essays A Whaler’s Dictionary (Milkweed, 2008) are the subject of a extensive exploratory essay by B.K. Fischer in the November-December issue of Boston Review, which speculates upon the origins of this poet’s intensely “collaborative” method and praises Beachy-Quick’s “dazzling textual constellations and impeccable understanding.” Here are excerpts from Fischer’s essay: Beachy-Quick relies on another post-structuralist axiom: reading is a collaborative endeavor in which writer and reader reciprocally produce a plurality of meanings. . . . Many ostensible poet-reader collaborations turn out to be exercises in reader-hating obscurity, hipper-than-thou insouciance, or faux-intimate gestures that invite vague recognition only to degenerate into outright confusion. Beachy-Quick avoids these pitfalls with a tone of almost painful earnestness and gentle exhortation. . . . Inviting the reader into a sacred readerly space, Beachy-Quick tries to modulate the sheer force of a deluge of reference. . . . What makes this cascade of high-cultural citation tolerable and even pleasing is the twining process itself—a poetics of the gerund. The syntactic motor of the book is the present participle as thing, action, and motion as form. The result is a poetic universe abuzz with ‘humming,’ ‘cawing,’ ‘echoing,’ ‘reading,’ ‘roaming,’ ‘embracing,’ and thinking.’ . . . Beachy-Quick has assimilated the terms of postmodern poetics without the corrosive irony that debilitates so many poets of his generation, and the result conveys a generosity of spirit and of utterance for which the reader can be very grateful. He is impressed by beauty, intimate in address. He has a gift for prose syntax and traditional poetic musicality, and he is not afraid to use either of them—or of sounding ‘literary.’ Tupelo Press |