“[I]f Emerson provides Beachy-Quick with a metaphysics, it is American modernism that gives the book its formal and rhetorical peculiarities. The shape and tone of the poetry allude to T.S. Eliot’s fragments, Olson’s projective verse, and Howe’s elliptical lyricism. Lines from poetic mentors (Wallace Stevens in particular) drift in and out. Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos anchor the meditations of ‘Fragile Elegy,’ one of the most compelling poems in the book, and we might find in this relationship a helpful gloss on Beachy-Quick’s poetics.”— Justin Sider, Make Magazine
“Perhaps it is not a logical assumption that a collection of poems inspired by the philosophical musings in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay ‘Circles,’ would be especially exciting. Intelligent, yes, but compelling? Whimsical? In Dan Beachy-Quick’s Circle’s Apprentice, he conjures forth poems out of Emerson’s concepts which become not only compelling, but romantic and wild.” — Layla Benitez-James, Gulf Coast