Touching This Leviathan

Touching This Leviathan asks how we might come to know the unknowable—in this case, whales, animals so large yet so elusive, revealing just a sliver of back, a glimpse of a fluke, or a split-second breach before diving away.

Whale books often sit within disciplinary silos. Touching This Leviathan starts a conversation among them. Drawing on biology, theology, natural history, literature, and writing studies, Peter Wayne Moe offers a deep dive into the alluring and impalpable mysteries of Earth’s largest mammal.

Entertaining, thought-provoking, and swimming with intelligence and wit, Touching is Leviathan is creative nonfiction that gestures toward science and literary criticism as it invites readers into the belly of the whale.

Order

Recognition

Touching This Leviathan is a Seattle Times best of 2021 selection and is included on the Seattle Met’s Big Seattle Reading List. A chapter appears in Fourth Genre and is a “Notable Essay” in the Best American Essays 2021.

Reviews in Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Seattle Met, Our Coast Magazine, EcoTheo Collective, Brevity, & City Journal.

Philip Hoare
author, The Whale

Moe’s book is an obsessive act of poetry and reclamation out of memory and fact, a referential reverie. It is highly imagined and imaginative, as digressive as Melville’s great opus, yet condensed into these few intense pages. It speaks of faith and spirituality and blasphemy and dissent. It is as brilliant on writing as it is on whales: the saying of them, their naming, their presence and absence. Skeletal, pathologised, sensual, mythologised, it lies very close indeed to the whale, to the whaleness of the whale. And like Moby-Dick, I would read it all over again.

James K. A. Smith
editor of Image Journal

Part of the marvel of this book is its refusal to be categorized or be fully comprehended. Like the whale, I can’t quite get a handle on it because, though compact at 150 pages, there is an ambition and mystery that is felt but also out of reach. There is a suggestiveness about this genre-defying book such that I have a sense there is always more going on than I am consciously processing. And yet I know this is by design, a feat of craft.

So if I try to describe it for you, I’m going to fail. Touching This Leviathan is at once a memoir, an essay on the art of composition, a commonplace book, and a love letter to whales. It is an artful collage in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.