"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