Description
Book SynopsisPart of a "Pacific Northwest Poetry Series", this book explores the intimacies of the shorter line as well and displays the author's formal inventiveness and emotional range. It addresses our time and human condition in ways both domestic and global.
Trade Review"Biespiel is a true poetic innovator."
* The Portland Mercury *
"Biespiel has a gift for transformation . . . he can make a command sound like an incantation. He can create psalm—like beauty from the repetition of a simple phrase . . . one must note the instances of raw brilliance."
* Chelsea *
"[Biespiel] writes with a belief in the redemptive powers of poetry."
* Choice *
"When David Biespiel tempers his 'bared teeth' voice with a commitment to the things, and not just the atmospheres, of this world, he can register sharp portraits of people, in relationships and alone, in all their bitter, beautiful want."
* Poetry Magazine *
"Biespiel's debut collection is sustained by a search for transcendent, intuitive truths."
* Publisher's Weekly *
"In his book about regret, longing, and loss, Biespiel explores the intricacies of relationships between men and women in settings both real and imaginary."
* The Poetry Foundation *
Table of ContentsEvening Watch
1
Genesis 12
Poet at Forty
Though Your Sins Be Scarlet
The Ex-Lovers Close Down the Hawthorne Boulevard
Bars on the 1000th Night of the War
Embouchure
Kohain
The Sleeping Beauty
Dover Butch
Citizen Dave
Tale Bearer
2
Mississippi God Damn
Richard Hugo
Old Adam Outside the Wall of Eden
Genesis 27
Overcast
William Clark’s Sonnets
Ezra Pound
Bad Marriages
Luke’s Ukulele
P.O.E.M.
Mass Man
3
The Husband’s Tale
The Wife’s Tale
The Wife’s Tale (II)
The Crooner
Prudery
Lust
A Cloud of Crows
Engine Man
Little Crow
Rag and Bone Man
4
Man and Wife
Bloom and Decay
The Hummingbird
Bathsheba
Psalm 51
The Green Bed
Banished
Marvel
Secret
Ovid in Exile
Dissolution in Winter
O’Bryant Square
The Theory of Hats
Acknowledgments
About the Poet
A Note on the Type
