The formally nuanced and wise epistolary poems in David Biespiel�s new collection are grounded in friendship, camaraderie, and the vulnerability and boldness that defines America.Roving from the old Confederacy of Biespiel's native South to Portland, Oregon, Charming Gardeners explores the wildness of the Northwest, the avenues of Washington, D.C., the coal fields of West Virginia, and an endless stretch of airplanes and hotel rooms from New York to Texas to California.These...
Inspired by Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour , and sharing the spirit of Tomas Transtromer’s Baltics and Yehuda Amichai’s Time , Republic Café is a meditation on love during a time of violence, and a tally of what appears and disappears in every moment. Mindful of epigenetic experience as our bodies become living vessels for history’s tragedies, David Biespiel praises not only the essentialness of our human memory, but also the sanctity of our flawed, human forgetting.A single sequence,...
David Biespiel�s long poetic lines crackle with rhythmic energy and a jazzy, bittersweet richness of language. Rolling out across the page like darkly luminous highways, his innovative, nine-line «American sonnets» promise adventure, offering a variant on the sonnet form that is both lyric and dramatic and bringing his masterful formal inventiveness to free verse. «I�ve come to imagine the nine-line sonnet to be like one of those classic Thunderbirds,» says Biespiel,...
