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
The Book of Men and Women
Best Books of the Year, Poetry Foundation
Oregon Book Award for Poetry
Addressing our time and human condition in ways both domestic and global, David Biespiel's poems are connected to the social and historical world, offering a mythic story about men and women in and out of love.
David Biespiel's energetic language is quite unmatched by that of other contemporary poets in a book that confronts the frailties of love and desire with unflinching intimacy and gratitude. A fully imagined tour de force.
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"[David Biespiel] has mastered his own grand style. The cascade of invention, the big eclectic lexicon and rich figures of sound are not for show, but for doing work, living up to this ambitious title: The Book of Men and Women...This is language soaring up above the earth, teasing its way beyond stolid paraphrase, but on the other hand it is always connected to...the intricate, rich but discordant music."
— Robert Pinsky, Literary Arts
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"David Biespiel makes poems in the space cleared by the (some would say oppositional) forces of Robert Lowell and John Ashbery. But Biespiel has gifts all his own, the greatest of which is a quirky, alliterative idiom...Biespiel’s bristly voice is the first thing most readers will note...When [he] 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."
— Nate Klug, Poetry
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*****
The Book of Men and Women
University of Washington Press
2009