Republic Café

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, arranged in fifty-four numbered sections, Republic Café details the experience of lovers in Portland, Oregon, on the eve and days following September 11, 2001. To touch a loved one's bare skin, even in the midst of great tragedy, is simultaneously an act of remembering and forgetting. This is a tale of love and darkness, a magical portrait of the writer as a moral and imaginative participant in the political life of his nation.

Author: David Biespiel
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: 02/01/2019
Pages: 96
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.55lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.10w x 0.70d
ISBN: 9780295744537

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 03/01/2019 pg. 125

About the Author

David Biespiel is a poet, critic, memoirist, and contributing to writer to American Poetry Review, New Republic, the New York Times, Poetry, Politico, The Rumpus, and Slate. He is poet-in-residence at Oregon State University, faculty member in the Rainier Writers Workshop, and president of the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters. He has received NEA and Lannan fellowships and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Balakian Award. His most recent book is The Education of a Young Poet. He has previously published three books in the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series: Wild Civility, The Book of Men and Women, and Charming Gardeners.