With muscular language and visceral imagery, Club Icarus bears witness to the pain, the fear, and the flimsy mortality that births our humanity as well as the hope, humor, love, and joy that completes it. This book will appeal to sons and fathers, to parents and children, to those tired of poetry that makes no sense, to those who think lyric poetry is dead, to those who think the narrative poem is stale, to those who think that poetry has sealed itself off from the living world, and to those who appreciate the vernacular as the language of living and the act of living as something worth putting into language.

Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer’s grand opera Moby-Dick was a stunning success in the world premiere production by the Dallas Opera in 2010. Robert K. Wallace attended the final performance of the Dallas production and has written this book so readers can experience the process by which this contemporary masterpiece was created and performed on stage. Interviews with the creative team and draft revisions of the libretto and score show the opera in the process of being born. Interviews with the principal singers and the production staff follow the five-week rehearsal period into the world premiere production, each step of the way illustrated by more than two hundred color photographs by Karen Almond. Opera fans, lovers of Moby-Dick, and students of American and global culture will welcome this book as highly readable and visually enthralling account of the creation of a remarkable new opera that does full justice to its celebrated literary source. Just as Heggie and Scheer’s opera is enjoyed by operagoers with no direct knowledge of Moby-Dick, so will this book be enjoyed by opera fans unaware of Melville and by Melville fans unaware of opera.