Other Seas: Sailing without Ahab

Abstract: This essay tracks a recent book of poetry, Sailing without Ahab , which traces the voyage of the Pequod without its Captain and with a series of twenty-first century companions. The poems both articulate a reading of Moby-Dick and also describe a watery way of living shadowed by Melville's novel. Fellow readers and artists including Courtney Leonard, Philip Hoare, Suzanne Conklin Akbari, and the mapmaker John Wyatt Greenlee join in the voyage. In one hundred thirty-eight poems—one for each chapter, plus the Extracts, Etymology, and Epilogue—this book swims and dances with Melville's novel into an uncertain and variable present day.