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.

David Biespiel was born in Oklahoma in 1964 and grew up in Texas. He is the author of a dozen books. His first collection of poems, Shattering Air (1996), was published by BOA Editions. The University of Washington Press published his next major volumes of poetry: Wild Civility (2003), The Book of Men and Women (2009), which received the Stafford Hall Award, Charming Gardeners (2013), and Republic Café (2019). He is the author of the novel A Self-Portrait in the Year of the High Commission on Love (2023). His nonfiction includes the memoirs A Place of Exodus (2020) and The Education of a Young Poet (2017), which was selected a Best Books for Writers by Poets & Writers, as well as two collections of essays, including A Long High Whistle (2015), which received the Frances Fuller Victor Award, and Every Writer Has a Thousand Faces (2010). He is the founder in 1999 of the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters, and he served as editor of Poetry Northwest from 2005-2010. He has read his poems and spoken about poetry all over the country, including teaching appointments at Stanford and Wake Forest universities, among others, and for the past quarter century at Oregon State University where he has been Poet-in-Residence. The recipient of Lannan and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Balakian citation, he is a contributor to The New Yorker, The New Republic, and Poetry. He lives with his wife, Wendy Willis, on several acres of forest in Portland.