David Biespiel cracks open the creative process as he candidly tracks his own development as a writer and challenges traditional assumptions about writing that can stifle creativity. The liberating message: Working past the brink of failure--being free to try and discard and try again--is what allows the creative process to playfully flourish, keeping the spirit open to unexpected discoveries. Both beginning and experienced writers—as well as artists, musicians, dancers, and anyone else on a creative path—will benefit from this elegant, surprising, and fresh perspective.
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"Finally, an anti-bullshit book on creativity!"
— James Marcus
"Does for the creative process what Strunk and White did for our approach to grammar and style. Indispensable."
— Marjorie Sandor
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"Every Writer Has a Thousand Faces instead of the advice de rigueur, is a well-spring of ideas for how to jump start the creative process, valuable examples of athletic and visual artists who exercise this proposed method, and, perhaps most importantly, oodles of empathy for the writer and artist who is battling their own stuck process and potentially self-doubt or frustration."
— Hazel & Wren
Shattering Air
Oregon Book Award (Finalist)
Oklahoma Center for the Book Award (Finalist)
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David Biespiel's first book of poems is lyrical and sensual, celebrating the physical facts and pleasures of this world.
Many of these poems find their focus in Texas where Biespiel grew up, and on the beaches and coasts of the Pacific Northwest where the author now lives. Bayous and lilacs, sanderlings and willows, and young lovers on a diving platform at 3 a.m., become, in Shattering Air, emblems for the correspondence between the natural world and the human spirit..
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"It's a test of test seamlessness of his art," writes Stanley Plumly in his introduction, "that David Biespiel finds his vitality and subtlety in the commonplace as well as the luminous moment as if the inwardness of an experience were its subject."
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"Sustained by a search for transcendent, intuitive truths."
— Publishers Weekly
"Biespiel's first volume of poems is impressive, particularly for the poet's gift with metaphor."
— Choice
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"David 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
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Poems of quiet grandeur and nobility [that] bring to mind an out-of-the-self Keatsian sensibility. "
— A. V. Christie, The Journal
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*****
Shattering Air
BOA Editions
1996