Inspired by Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour, and sharing the spirit of Tomas Transtromer's Baltics and Yehuda Amichai's Time, Republic Café is a meditation on love during a time of violence, and 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 our human memory, but also the sanctity of our flawed, human forgetting.
A single sequence, arranged in fifty-four numbered sections, Republic Café details the experience of lovers in Portland, Oregon, on the eve and days following September 11, 2001. To touch a loved one's bare skin, even in the midst of great tragedy, is simultaneously an act of remembering and forgetting. This 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.
"David Biespiel meditates on love during a time of violence, tallying what appears and disappears from moment to moment."
-- Publishers Weekly
"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...healing, and love."
-- Library Journal (Starred Review)
"[Republic Café] creates a kind physical and metaphysical intimacy that feels quite rare in the present moment of American poetry . . . David Biespiel has worked to help us remember why poets make poems."
-- The Rumpus
"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."
~ Plume
"[Republic Café] embodies the splintering that the memory and threat of violence do to our consciousness, on both a global and personal scale....[David Biespiel] unravels a tale of enormity...[and] calls the liminal space we straddle in times of crisis home, out of necessity as well as courage."
~ Colorado Review
"Throughout the course of the collection, [David Biespiel] weaves a narrative, of lovers whose lives are full of foliage and feeling before being ripped apart by history."
~ Willamette Week
"I was unprepared for the true enormity of the scope of this remarkable, deeply moving and consistently compelling new book. With his usual elegance and formal grace, David Biespiel's Republic Café strikes me as being both expansive and deeply forgiving of human acts, however horrible."
-- David St. John
"Biespiel's finest book of poems to date. Republic Café builds on Biespiel's 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 Baker
"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."
-- Laura Kasischke
