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
Beautiful Is the World
New and Selected Poems, 1996-2026
In Beautiful Is the World, David Biespiel spans three decades of lyric intensity, tracing the intimate cartography of memory, place, and inheritance. These poems move between the Pacific Northwest's rain-soaked landscapes and the haunted reaches of Jewish ancestry, between the urgent present and history's long shadows. Biespiel's lines shimmer with atmospheric precision — "star-this, star-that, settled into rest" — while confronting mortality, brotherhood, and the stubborn persistence of the past. From elegiac meditations to sprawling epistolary sequences, this New and Selected volume showcases a poet of remarkable range: tender and unflinching, rooted in American soil yet alive to exile's ancient grief.
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​Publication Date: Sep 22 2026
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Beautiful Is the World: New and Selected Poems, 1996 - 2026
Unbound Editions
2026
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