David Biespiel

David Biespiel was born in 1964 and grew up in Houston, Texas.  He is a poet, literary critic, columnist, and contributing writer at The Rumpus, American Poetry Review, Politico, New Republic, Partisan, Slate, Poetry, and The New York Times, among other publications.

He is the author of ten books, most recently The Education of a Young Poet, A Long High Whistle, which received the 2016 Oregon Book Award for General Nonfiction, and The Book of Men and Women, which was chosen one of the Best Books of the Year by the Poetry Foundation and received the 2011 Oregon Book Award for Poetry.

Recently I asked Biespiel about what he was reading. His reply:

I’m reading Men, Women, and Other Anticlimaxes by Anatole Broyard. It’s collection of pieces by the late New York Times book critic about, as the title tells, men and women in different stages of their lives. Broyard’s style is terrifically easy, complimentary, without neurosis. He can handle the bucolic and the mean streets with an undisturbed acquaintance with their complexities and simplicities. I’m also reading the June Fourth Elegies by Liu Xiaobo, translated by Jeffery Yang. The poems are hit and miss really, by my tastes, but the subject matter about the struggle for human rights in China, about the events in Tiananmen Square in 1989 wonderfully thrusts language and meaning into the widest civic sphere a poet can.

Visit David Biespiel's website.

--Marshal Zeringue