Republic Café - Hardcover
Pay over time for orders over $35.00 with
Offers & Perks
Earn 17 points with this purchase
Added to your rewards balance after checkout.
100 points welcome bonus
Create an account and start with extra points.
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 is a poet, critic, memoirist, and contributing to writer to American Poetry Review, New Republic, the New York Times, Poetry, Politico, The Rumpus, and Slate. He is poet-in-residence at Oregon State University, faculty member in the Rainier Writers Workshop, and president of the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters. He has received NEA and Lannan fellowships and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Balakian Award. His most recent book is The Education of a Young Poet. He has previously published three books in the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series: Wild Civility, The Book of Men and Women, and Charming Gardeners.
Contributor(s)
Author
Free shipping on orders over $75. Standard shipping takes 3-7 business days. Eligible items may be returned within 30 days of delivery. Conditions apply.