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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

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