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Friends,
I’ve been in touch recently with a fistful of updates here at the Attic Institute — new website, socials, workshops, studios, and events — but I haven’t mentioned that, all along, I’ve also been in the last stages of preparing a new book for publication.
I’m writing today to give you a first look at the cover of Beautiful Is the World: New and Selected Poems, 1996-2026, which Unbound Edition Press will publish later this month.
For those who don’t know me, I’ll drop my bio below the signature.
You may already be familiar with this book, but just to recap. Here is the book jacket copy:
“In Beautiful Is the World, David Biespiel spans three decades of lyric intensity, tracing the intimate cartography of memory, place, and inheritance. These poems move between the Pacific Northwest’s rain-soaked landscapes and the haunted reaches of Jewish ancestry, between the urgent present and history’s long shadows. Biespiel’s lines shimmer with atmospheric precision — “star-this, star-that, settled into rest” — while confronting mortality, brotherhood, and the stubborn persistence of the past. From elegiac meditations to sprawling epistolary sequences, this New and Selected volume showcases a poet of remarkable range: tender and unflinching, rooted in American soil yet alive to exile’s ancient grief.”
Exclusive pre-orders open today — I want to urge any of you who are thinking of ordering this book to please pre-order it. Pre-ordering now helps the book in all manner of ways. Pre-orders count for first-week sales, and first-week sales are more or less when a book gets its best attention. It takes just a couple clicks.
Pre-order from Unbound Edition Press.
Pre-order from Itasca Books Distributor.
Pre-order from Powell's Books.
Soon, the book will be available on all the online booksellers. And, you can always ask your local independent bookshop to order it.
I’ve been grateful for some early enthusiastic praise. In Poetry magazine, Nate Klug said of the centerpiece’s of the book, The Book of Men and Women:
“David Biespiel makes poems in the space cleared by the (some would say oppositional) forces of Robert Lowell and John Ashbery. But Biespiel has gifts all his own, the greatest of which is a quirky, alliterative idiom…”
Patrick Davis, publisher and editor in chief at Unbound Edition Press, is too kind when he announced the acquisition of the book:
“David Biespiel is singular in his command on the page across genres, his poetry standing apart from all other contemporary voices. These selected poems will last and it is our honor to be entrusted with them.”
I learned this week the book has already been nominated by the American Library Association for the Sophie Brody Medal.
Already, too, a series of interviews celebrating the publication of this book is underway. The first came out last week with the outstanding literary magazine The Adroit Journal.
This will be my fourteenth book published across poetry, memoir, criticism and fiction. All of my books matter to me. But this one feels special, a retrospective of thirty years of publishing poems — a meeting of old friends for some readers, I suppose, and for others, I hope, an introduction.
Finally, at a time when so much of the world is plunged into violence and darkness, it’s a privilege to bring this book to you with something that poems are sometimes equipped to do: counter the chaos.
I’ll be making announcements soon about three special, fall readings in Portland. Please save the dates:
Oct 14. Powell’s City of Books
Oct 18. Sundays on the Avenue
Nov 18. Milwaukie Poetry Series
For now, thanks so much for your support of this book, for reading it, and for being the heart and soul of the Attic community of writers.
Courage,
D.
David Biespiel is a poet, novelist, critic, memoirist, and painter. The author of a dozen books, he is a contributor to American Poetry Review, New Republic, and The New Yorker, and recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Lannan fellowship, Stegner fellowship, two Oregon Book Awards, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, and been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Balakian citation in criticism. He is poet-in-residence in the MFA program in creative writing at Oregon State University and the founder of the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters.
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