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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 in his Preface, "something distinctly American: wide, roomy, and with a robust engine." The vastly varied voices within the poems are united by a wonderfully limber diction. Using with revelatory precision the vocabularies of history, science, art, sport, philosophy, religion, literature, government, and domestic life, Biespiel has crafted a hip, melodic, elastic language that travels the registers of expression: lush and coarse, gaudy and austere, pliant and rigidly tough. The civility of these poems is the form; the wildness is the bristling energy of the language. Passionate, resilient, rich with wit and word play, these poems affirm David Biespiel's increasing stature as a poet of remarkable accomplishment and promise. And yet I was so unlike the others, the young Turks and kaffiyeh-draped factotums Saying "You All in their cool way and flying tourist class inside a cage of fireproof wigs. Hephaestus used up drachmas for his ardent spirits and tossed by numbers. His joy stick Worn to the nerve. Always a mix-up: not the judge but the jester, not the lowborn. But the nursling. The ripped, the unripped, the unripened, the wide spreading. And always, too, the marching choirs, off-key on the Lord's Day, Breaking into trochalpatterns at half time. I'll skip the spa for despots and triumvirates Who sneak seconds from the griddlecakes. To hell with inheritance. Let the trustees mix a tour de force. All the drama I want is to be a turf man among green-helmeted horses. And, whenever possible, to be
List of contents
Preface
Pagan
Hallucination
Under a Blossoming Plum Tree
French Kiss
Poets
Dear Justice
Explication de Texte
Faith
Gentrification
After the Wedding
Drunks
Shoulders
Brawls
Sangria
Xerxes
Prayer
Starlings
Exile
Godhood
Ferdinand Magellan
Parties
Spiritual Guy
Brusque
Ars Poetica
Kazoo
Civilization in the Next War
Home
Amichai 1924-2000
Hermes
Acknowledgments
About the Poet
About the author
David Biespiel is a poet, literary critic, columnist, and contributing writer at the
American Poetry Review, the
New Republic, the
New York Times, Slate, Poetry, Politico, and
The Rumpus, among other publications. He is the author of ten books, most recently
The Education of a Young Poet, named by Poets & Writers as a Best Book for Writers;
A Long High Whistle, which received the 2016 Oregon Book Award for General Nonfiction; and
The Book of Men and Women, which was chosen one of the Best Books of the Year by the Poetry Foundation and received the 2011 Oregon Book Award for Poetry. He was a 2018 National Book Critics Circle Finalist for the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. Recipient of Lannan, National Endowment for the Arts, and Stegner fellowships, he has taught at Stanford University, University of Maryland, George Washington University, and Wake Forest University, in addition to other colleges and universities. He is Poet in Residence at Oregon State University and president of the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters.
Summary
Rolling out across the page like darkly luminous highways, the author's 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.
