"Essayistic, inventive, and frequently brilliant." --Poetry Foundation "This is a rich, profound, fascinating book, the kind that widens the margins of everything we read, making room for new observations, more creative relationships all around: writer/reader, person/book, literature/life." --Los Angeles Times "Wounded by a book, wounded by the force of idolatrous speech in Moby-Dick, Dan Beachy-Quick has mounted a kind of folly, a nautilus, enclosing the furtive wall of his own lyric sensibility. A Whaler's Dictionary reminds us why poets must sometimes measure their gifts against the calculus of prose, and why criticism by poets, unlike academic arguments, sometimes produces a flame which stands the test of time." --Daniel Tiffany, author of Toy Medium and Puppet Wardrobe "This is a major work on the charged relationship that can come into being between text and reader, written by one of America's most significant young poets." --Lyn Hejinian, author of Saga/Circus and The Fatalist "A Whaler's Dictionary manages to function as an oddly ideal work of criticism, breathing new life into Moby-Dick and showing how the novel subsists as an intricately living thing." --Virginia Quarterly Review