Republic Café

"Arguably his finest work. . . Republic Café seems effortlessly ambitious in scope. Biespiel explores broad, overarching themes that few poets are willing to meet head on today. Though the story background is horrific, the poem is hopeful. . . . It reminds us that love is key to our survival and that forgiveness is a requirement, not an option. Republic Café is the graceful and moving work of a poet at the top of his game. It should be part of your permanent library."

"David Biespiel’s sixth and latest book of poems, Republic Café, should be within your reach as soon as you can make it happen. The book shouldn’t be placed in between others on your bookshelf or in your 'books to read' pile. Republic Café should be where you can reach it so it can open its door for you, seat you immediately, and begin giving you what you didn’t know you could order or hunger for."

"Eloquent and personal, beautiful and wrenching, these poems mine deeply the nature of love, violence, and memory, drawing you into a world of evil and pain but also touch, healing, and love...Not to be missed."

"Biespiel's voice truly soars. . . .Throughout the course of the collection, [he] weaves a narrative, of lovers whose lives are full of foliage and feeling before being ripped apart by history."

"Republic Café calls the liminal space we straddle in times of crisis home, out of necessity as well as courage."

"I was unprepared for the true enormity of the scope of this remarkable, deeply moving, and consistently compelling new book. With Biespiel's usual elegance and formal grace, Republic Café strikes me as being both expansive and deeply forgiving of human acts, however horrible."

"Biespiel’s finest book of poems to date. Republic Café builds on his strengths as a lyric poet with a social conscience, a latter-day Romantic in a skeptical time. Republic Café is both personal and political, much in the manner of its evident forebear, Walt Whitman. This is a postmodernist’s Romanticism."

"David Biespiel reinvents poetry in Republic Café by mating a love poem with a historical narrative. A moment in time, a self within it—together the size of a pinprick—are revealed here to be as infinite as the universe. Nothing escapes the net this poet casts out with his powerful form and original vision. Transcendent, mysterious, and as supernatural as it is completely human, this is poetry that transforms the reader."