About the Author: Steve Mentz is Professor of English and chair of the Department at St. John’s University, where he teaches Shakespeare, literary theory, and the “blue humanities” with a focus on environmental questions. Responding in his research and teaching to ecological crisis has brought his work beyond Shakespeare to embrace oceanic culture, environmental philosophy, and artistic performances. He believes that all arts are performing arts, and his Shakespeare classes see at least one live performance each semester. He is the author of Ocean (2020), published in Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series, Break Up the Anthropocene (2019), Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of Globalization, 1550-1719 (2015), At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean (2009), and Romance for Sale in Early Modern England (2006), editor or co-editor of six collections: The Cultural History of the Sea in the Early Modern Age (2021), The Routledge Companion to Marine and Maritime Worlds, 1400-1800 (2020), The Sea in Nineteenth-Century Anglophone Literary Culture (2017), Oceanic New York (2015), The Age of Thomas Nashe (2013), and Rogues and Early Modern English Culture (2004), and has published numerous articles and chapters on ecocriticism, Shakespeare, early modern literature, and the blue humanities. He curated an exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library, “Lost at Sea: The Ocean in the English Imagination, 1550 – 1750” (2010). Before arriving at St. John’s in 2003, Dr. Mentz taught for three years in the English Department at Iona College in New Rochelle, NY. His undergraduate degree is from Princeton University, where his senior thesis won the Francis LeMoyne Page Prize in Creative Writing. His PhD from Yale University.

About the Book: Sailing without Ahab presents a cycle of 138 ecopoetic poems, one for each chapter of Moby-Dick. These poems launch the reader into oceanic chaos without the stabilizing mad focus of the Nantucket captain. Guided by waywardness and curiosity, they 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. 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. Reviewers notes how 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, and the book serves as 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.

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