Dan Beachy-Quick

Dan Beachy-Quick Poems

Dan Beachy-Quick Biography

Dan Beachy-Quick is an American poet, writer, and critic. He is the author of four collections of poems, most recently, Circle's Apprentice (Tupelo Press), and A Whaler’s Dictionary (Milkweed Editions), a collection of essays about Moby Dick. His honors include a Lannan Foundation Residency. His poems have appeared widely in literary journals, including The Boston Review, The New Republic, Fence, Poetry (magazine), Chicago Review, VOLT, The Colorado Review, Paris Review, and New American Writing, and in anthologies including Best American Poetry 2008 and in a chaplet, Sleep/Echo/Song (Wintered Press, 2006). His essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Southern Review, The Poker, Rain Taxi, The Denver Quarterly, Interim, and other venues. He serves as Poetry Advisor for the literary journal A Public Space. Beachy-Quick was born in 1973 in Chicago, and grew up in Colorado and upstate New York. His parents divorced when he was three and he was raised by his mother in Colorado, and spent summers in Ithaca, New York, with his father and grandparents. He attended Hamilton College, the University of Denver, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has taught writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and currently he is an assistant professor of English at Colorado State University. He lives in Fort Collins, Colorado with his wife and daughters.)

The Best Poem Of Dan Beachy-Quick

Heroisms, 4, 5

4.

I speak these words directly into his yawn

Open cave of
his dark almost kind
of fire-lit mouth


And the shadows there my words form these shadows
In the back of the hero's throat

A world we applaud where chained to the ground
We watch the trees walk past us. There are other ways to describe the year:

Seasons of
The hero's boredom.


5.

Where the horror is comparison, honor sees
Hands in the trees instead of leaves—

Honesty asks why the applause is so quiet
When the wind blows so hard—

Breath is the atmosphere at utmost extreme
Where the lungs are flowers—thought the dew—

The sun doubts everything, a general statement
In whose light the hero sees these helpless things

Beg mercy, beg darkness for obscurity—
We do not comprehend the awe, it comprehends us—

When leaves fold in halves they look sleepy
Like eyes, but these eyes are fists

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