Republic Café

the long version

"Republic Cafe is a meditative, poetic journal about love during a time of violence. The book is 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 human memory, but also the sanctity of our flawed, human forgetting. The book is a single poem -- 54 sections divided into three units each. The narrative details the experience of lovers in the American West, in Portland, on the eve and day of September 11, 2001. Evoking the slipperiness of public and private memory, Republic Cafe dramatizes that to fall in love secretly -- even just to touch a lover's bare skin and even in the midst of great tragedy -- is to perform a simultaneous act of remembering and forgetting. To be in the moments of the fullness of love is to be both free of and compromised by time and history. 'The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me, ' writes Walt Whitman in one of the book's three epigraphs. In the same expansive spirit, Republic Cafe 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"--