Journey through uncharted literary waters and explore Herman Melville’s epic “Moby-Dick” in bold new light. Come sail with I. 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 welcome 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.

“Done with the compass!
Done with the chart!”

Steve Mentz “Sailing without Ahab: Ecopoetic Travels”. Foreword by Suzanne Conklin Akbari. Published by Fordham University Press in 2024. Donated to the library by Steve Mentz ❤️

Photos by Anna Iltnere / Sea Library