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Sailing Without Ahab : Ecopoetic Travels - Steve Mentz

Sailing Without Ahab

Ecopoetic Travels

By: Steve Mentz, Suzanne Conklin Akbari (Foreword by)

Paperback | 2 April 2024

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Navigate the Depths of a Timeless Classic, Reimagined.
Come sail with I.
We're not taking the same trip, though you might recognize the familiarcourse. This time, the Pequod's American voyage steers its course acrossthe curvature of the Word Ocean without anyone at the helm. We are leaving one man and his madness on shore. Our ship overflows with glorious plurality - multiracial, visionary, queer, conflicted, polyphonic, playful, violent. But on this voyage something is different. Today we sail headless without any Captain. Instead of binding ourselves to the dismasted tyrant's rage, the ship's crew seeks only what we will find: currents teeming with life, a blue-watered alien globe, toothy cetacean smiles from vasty deeps. Treasures await those who sail without.
This cycle of one hundred thirty-eight poems - one for each chapter in Moby-Dick, plus the Etymology, Extracts, and Epilogue - launches into oceanic chaos without the stabilizing mad focus of the Nantucket captain. Guided by waywardness and curiosity, these poems seek an alien ecopoetics of marine depths, the refraction of light, the taste of salt on skin. Directionless, these poems reach out to touch oceanic expanse and depth. It's not an easy voyage, and not a certain one. It lures you forward. It has fixed its barbed hook in I.
Sailing without means relinquishing goals, sleeping at the masthead, forgetting obsessions. I. welcomes you to trace wayward ways through these poems. Read them any way you can - back to front, at random, sideways, following the obscure promptings of your heart. It's the turning that matters. It's a blue wonder world that beckons.

Industry Reviews
Presents a cycle of 138 ecopoetic poems, one for each chapter of Moby-Dick.-- "Publishers Weekly" Sailing without Ahab is a rendering of Moby-Dick. The novel is boiled down from the whale's fatty flesh, melted into transparent and pure oil. The rendered poems imagine new ways of being in the world.---Suzanne Conklin Akbari, from the Foreword Steve Mentz takes Moby-Dick apart and puts it back together again. Moby distilled, fractured and reformed, sent to the moon, pathologized. We're in the territory with him, with Mentz, with I., with the dog, with the ocean and the sky, and there's no getting out of it till the end and the beginning again. I've never been so excited to read on. There are all our Moby-Dicks in here. Like Ishmael we have no idea where we're going, and the voyage is intense - it's the getting there that's the point and the joy. No one since W.H. Auden, or perhaps Charles Olston, has got under the ocean's skin and Melville's obsessional brilliance like this. It's not so much a collection of poems as a sensurround sound of water whales ecstasy violence desire and glorious noise. Like Moby-Dick itself, circa 2024 AD.---Philip Hoare, author of The Whale An innovative and poetic imagining of the Pequod's journey without Ahab as well as its representations of the wild oceanic currents, spaces and depths, Steve Mentz contributes to our understanding of ecopoetry, the blue humanities, and even Melville studies in an original and stimulating manner.---Craig Santos Perez, author of Navigating Chamoru Poetry: Indigeneity, Aesthetics, and Decolonization

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