After Moby-Dick

An Anthology of New Poetry

edited by
Elizabeth Schultz & Kylan Rice

After Moby-Dick, An Anthology of New Poetry is comprised of sixty-one poems, all based on Melville’s great novel and written since 2000 by thirty-three contemporary American poets. Two of the poets featured in the anthology are residents of the New Bedford area and have published collections of poetry with Spinner Publications: Laurie Robertson-Lorant, author of The Man Who Lived Among the Cannibals and Everett Hoagland, author of This City and Other Poems. Hoagland also edited Spinner’s Ocean Voices: An Anthology of Ocean Poems.

 Recognizing that Moby-Dick, itself a seafaring epic song, inspired numerous poets during the twentieth century, After Moby-Dick editors conducted a national search for twenty-first century Moby-Dick poetry. From approximately 100 submissions, they chose thirty-three poets to contribute to the anthology. Using those poems as the nucleus for the anthology and drawing on other poems related to Moby-Dick by established twentieth-first century poets, After Moby-Dick is the stunning and memorable result. 

 The anthology includes prefaces by both editors: Elizabeth’s focuses on Moby-Dick-inspired poetry primarily of the twentieth century, establishing a poetic and historical context for the poems in the anthology; Kylan’s preface focuses on the diversity and contemporaneity of the poems—focusing on their style and subject matter—contained in the anthology itself. The anthology is divided into two parts: “Re-Presenting Moby-Dick” sets forth poems in relation to the narrative of Melville’s novel, the appearance of its characters, and the order of its events and images and “Re-Incarnating Moby-Dick” groups poems in relation to a range of concepts represented in the novel. 

 Although some of the poets in After Moby-Dick do not yet have national recognition, others included in the anthology such as Dan Beachy-Quick and Jessica Cuello are both well-known and highly regarded poets.