Dan Beachy-Quick

Poet and essayist Dan Beachy-Quick was born in Chicago and raised in Colorado and upstate New York. He was educated at Hamilton College, the University of Denver, and the University of Iowa.

His poetry collections include North True South Bright (2003); Spell (2004); Mulberry (2006), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for poetry; This Nest, Swift Passerine (2009); Circle’s Apprentice (2011); Of Silence and Song (2017); and Variations on Dawn and Dusk (2019). He is also the author of A Whaler’s Dictionary (2008), a collection of linked essays responding to Herman Melville‘s Moby Dick.

Drawing its material from a wide range of sources, Beachy-Quick’s poetry is often united by a focused engagement with the fabric of sound and the pattern of echoes. In a review of Mulberry for Jacket Magazine, poet Tim Kahl noted, “[J]uxtaposing and intermingling a strangely patterned nature with an equally strangely patterned domestic life, Beachy-Quick draws a haunting parallel between the realm of nature and the realm of the human.”

Beachy-Quick’s work has been supported by the Lannan Foundation. He teaches at Colorado State University, where he is a university distinguished teaching scholar.

Poetry by Dan Beachy-Quick

Sonnet

Must I anger and must my anger pearl,
My anger pearl, must I pearl, must I polish
Madness daily, rub nacre into a world
Perfect, round, what in my hand should finish

[Record no oiled tongue, diary]

Record no oiled tongue, diary–
Note my lantern bruises the low
Clouds with light the evening
We talked. Almonds in a bowl;
She ate none. I did
Not bid her remove her dark
Gloves as sometime before she had done.

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