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"From acclaimed poet and translator Dan Beachy-Quick comes this new addition to the Seedbank series: a warm, vivid translation of the earliest Greek intellects, inviting us to reconsider writing, and thinking, as a way of living meaningfully in the world"--
List of contents
Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes
Heraclitus
Xenophanes
Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Empedocles
About the author
Dan Beachy-Quick is the translator of
The Thinking Root and
Stone-Garland. He is also the author of nine collections of poems, three works of creative nonfiction, one novel, and a monograph on the work of John Keats. His work has been a winner of the Colorado Book Award, a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Prize and the PEN/USA Literary Award in Poetry, longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry, and included in the
Best American Poetry anthology. The recipient of a Lannan Foundation residency, his work has been supported by the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard University and the Guggenheim Foundation. He is a University Distinguished Teaching Scholar at Colorado State University, where he serves in the English department and teaches in the MFA program in creative writing.
Summary
Acclaimed poet and translator Dan Beachy-Quick offers this newest addition to the Seedbank series: a warm, vivid rendering of the earliest Greek intellects, inviting us to reconsider writing, and thinking, as a way of living meaningfully in the world.
“We have lost our sense of thinking as the experience that keeps us in the world,” writes Beachy-Quick, and the figures rendered in The Thinking Root—Heraclitus, Anaximander, Empedocles, Parmenides, and others—are among the first examples we have in Western civilization of thinkers who used writing as to record their impressions of a world where intuition and observation, and spirit and nature, have yet to be estranged. In these pages, we find clear-eyed ideas searching for shapes and forms with which to order the world, and to reveal our life in flux.
Drawn from “words that think,” these ancient Greek texts are fresh and alive in the hands of Beachy-Quick, who translates with the empathy of one who knows that “a word is its own form of life.” In aphorisms, axioms, vignettes, and anecdotes, these first theories of the world articulate a relationship to the world that precedes our story of its making, a world where “the beginning and the end are in common.”
A remarkable collection from one of our most accomplished poets, The Thinking Root renders a primary apprehension of life amidst life, a vision that echoes our gaze upon the stars.
Foreword
- Seedbank sampler, featuring an excerpt from the book, distributed at Winter Institute 2023
- Digital galley campaign, with DRCs available for major and poetry media; digital galley available for download on Edelweiss
- Media outreach
positioning this title as an important contribution to translated and world
literature, targeting the major outlets that reviewed Stone-Garland, as well as
academic outlets - Advertising with World
Literature Today and Words Without Borders - Newsletter promotion
via the publisher to readers, sales and academic lists of more than 30K contacts - Academic outreach to
seed book in classrooms for Greek studies, poetry studies, and philosophy
studies courses - Title and series
Reader’s Guides available for download - Special series
promotions to amplify the series’ impact in the marketplace - Launch in Colorado
