How many college writing courses are built around a book of poetry? What might that open up for students in terms of lessons on reading? What might it teach them about language and its uses?

Each rereading invites me into Melville’s sentences. Those sentences have become my companion, a companion not unlike my whale, sentences I’ve only yet begun to learn to read, a whale whose length I never will.

Even though the postcards and letters I receive and send say the same thing an email or text could, the physicality of the mail—the dirt on the postcard, the stamp from the post office, the waterlogged letter, the delay between correspondences—carries with it something that the digital simply can’t.