Sailing without Ahab
by Steve Mentz, Suzanne Conklin Akbari
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.
Hardcover
Brand New
Author Biography
Steve Mentz (Author)
Steve Mentz is Professor of English at St. John's University and author of An Introduction to the Blue Humanities (2023), Ocean (2020) and a poetry chapbook, "Swim Poems" (2022). He also writes and curates The Bookfish Blog at
Suzanne Conklin Akbari (Foreword By)
Suzanne Conklin Akbari is professor of Medieval Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and co-host of the literature podcast The Spouter-Inn.
Table of Contents
Foreword, by Suzanne Conklin Akbari | xv
Etymology (Supplied by a late consumptive Professor) | 1
Sailing Without | 3
Headless Travels | 5
Loomings | 11
Out of Place | 12
Fishing | 13
Change | 14
Vision | 15
The Street | 16
The Chapel | 17
The Pulpit | 18
Storm and Wreck | 19
A Bosom Friend | 20
Ideas | 21
Mapping Oceans | 22
Houses in Houses | 23
Nantucket | 24
Chowder | 25
Who's on the Ship? | 26
Intermittent Fasting | 27
Sea Living | 28
The Prophet | 29
Tomorrow! | 30
Going Aboard | 31
Merry Christmas | 32
The Lee Shore | 33
The Encounter | 34
Oil | 35
Politics | 36
Knights and Squires | 37
[ . . . ] | 38
A Scene on the Quarterdeck | 39
No Pipe | 40
Queen Mab | 41
No Book | 42
Lines of Succession | 43
Dinner | 44
The Mast-Head | 45
A Spring Rose | 46
Sunset | 47
Dusk | 48
First Night Watch | 49
Forecastle—Midnight | 50
Moby-Dick | 51
Great White Evil God | 52
Devils Who Never Sleep | 53
The Chart | 54
The Kind of Harpoon I. Throws | 55
Not Seasick | 56
Weavers | 57
The First Lowering | 58
Testament | 59
Fedallah | 60
The Spirit-Spout | 61
The P. Does Not Meet the Albatross | 62
How to Speak Whale | 63
The Town Ho's Story | 64
Monstrous Pictures of Whales | 65
Cetacean Errors | 66
Whale Rock | 67
Blue Dreams | 68
Squid | 69
The Line | 70
Stubb Kills a Whale | 71
Authorities | 72
Wooden Bodies | 73
Eating Whale | 74
Cannibal Old Me | 75
Two Shark Stories | 76
Whales and Other Humans | 77
In the Whalelight | 78
Whalefall | 79
The Whale's Head | 80
No Tail on the Jeroboam | 81
The Monkey-rope | 82
Brothers in Arms | 83
The Sperm Whale's Head | 84
The Right Whale's Head | 85
I.'s Blue | 86
Let the Oil Out! | 87
Birthing Tash | 88
Read It If You Can | 89
A Hill of Snow | 90
The P. Meets the V. | 91
The Honor and Glory of Whaling | 92
Jonah Historically Regarded | 93
Just a Little Farther | 94
How We Breathe | 95
The Tail | 96
The Grand Armada | 97
A Love Story | 98
Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish | 99
Heads or Tails | 100
The P. Meets the Rose Bud | 101
Ambergris | 102
The Castaway | 103
A Squeeze of the Hand | 104
The Cassock | 105
The State of the Ship | 106
The Lamp | 107
The Search | 109
No Doubloon | 110
The P. Meets the Samuel Enderby of London | 112
The Next Voyage | 112
Inside the Skeleton | 113
Measurements of the Whale's Skeleton | 114
The Fossil Whale | 115
Save the Whales! | 116
Glass Foot | 117
The Carpenter | 118
What the Carpenter Says | 119
Starbuck in the Cabin | 120
Q. in His Coffin | 121
The Pacific | 122
The Blacksmith | 123
Making a Harpoon | 124
Calenture | 125
The P. Meets the Bachelor | 126
The Dying Whale | 127
When It's Almost Possible to See | 128
The Quadrant | 129
Swimmer in Storm | 130
The Deck Towards the End of the First Night Watch | 131
Midnight—the Forecastle Bulwarks | 132
Midnight, Aloft—Thunder and Lightning | 133
Errors in a Book | 134
At Sea | 135
The Log and Line | 136
The Life-Buoy | 137
Coffins | 138
The P. Meets the Rachel | 139
Pip in the Cabin| 140
No Hat | 141
The P. Meets the Delight | 142
The Symphony | 143
The Chase—First Day | 144
The Chase—Second Day | 145
The Chase—Third Day | 149
Epilogue | 151
A Critical Postscript: Cyborgs, Whalemen, and Other Voyagers in Moby-Dick | 153
Acknowledgments | 173
Review
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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