“What a memorable, companionable, and singular book. I can’t think of another contemporary memoir that has this mix of political and literary intelligence, all embedded in a personal story that is told with great candor, historical consciousness, and wit. How I wish it had existed when I was a young poet!” ― Christian Wiman, author of Hammer Is The Prayer
“I love the scope of The Education of a Young Poet, which opens fifty years before the author’s birth. What better way of expressing the idea that poetry, like all art, is a matter of lineage, growing in equal part out of what we learn and who we are? Indeed, what David Biespiel has in mind here is less a craft book―although there are great craft riffs―than a memoir, a kind of portrait of the artist as a young man. ‘Feeling alien within the familiar,’ Biespiel describes it, the sensation of being a new poet. It’s as good a description as I’ve seen for the mix of distance and proximity, alienation and empathy, that all art requires, and perhaps most especially that of poetry.” ―David L. Ulin, author of Sidewalking
- KBOO