Republic Café

by David Biespiel

"Republic Caf�e is a meditative, poetic journal about love during a time of violence. The book is 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 human memory, but also the sanctity of our flawed, human forgetting. The book is a single poem -- 54 sections divided into three units each. The narrative details the experience of lovers in the American West, in Portland, on the eve and day of September 11, 2001. Evoking the slipperiness of public and private memory, Republic Caf�e dramatizes that to fall in love secretly -- even just to touch a lover's bare skin and even in the midst of great tragedy -- is to perform a simultaneous act of remembering and forgetting. To be in the moments of the fullness of love is to be both free of and compromised by time and history. 'The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me,' writes Walt Whitman in one of the book's three epigraphs. In the same expansive spirit, Republic Caf�e 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"

Genres: Poetry

82 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 1, 2019

About the author

David Biespiel was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1964, raised in Texas, and educated at Stanford University, University of Maryland, and Boston University.

One of the leading poets of his generation, he is the founder of the Attic Writers' Workshop in Portland, Oregon, editor of Poetry Northwest, poetry columnist for The Oregonian, and daily contributor on politics to The Politico."