Biespiel can excel with Northwestern landscape ... and his looks at U.S. history are at once informative and grand. Biespiel's verse letters [are] like letters in a correspondence, as part of an effort towards unguarded friendship, attentive to a poet with much to say. Publishers Weekly

The formally nuanced and wise epistolary poems in David Biespiel’s new collection are grounded in friendship, camaraderie, and the vulnerability and boldness that defines America.

Roving from the old Confederacy of Biespiel's native South to Portland, Oregon, Charming Gardeners explores the wildness of the Northwest, the avenues of Washington, D.C., the coal fields of West Virginia, and an endless stretch of airplanes and hotel rooms from New York to Texas to California.

These poems explore the “insistent murmurs” of memory and the emotional connections between individuals and history, as well as the bonds of brotherhood, the ghosts of America’s wars, and the vibrancy of love, sex, and intimacy. We are offered poems addressed to family, friends, poets, and political rivals — all in a masterful idiom Robert Pinsky has called Biespiel’s “own original grand style.”

I should stop back there

And stand on both feet in the grazing sunlight

And hear this chorus of America singing.

But I am so afraid of the testament of the delivered.

from “TO __________ FROM THE JEWISH CEMETERY IN WILLIAMSON, WEST VIRGINIA

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"These are lengthy, traveling poems that talk and click along like a train (though most of the travel is by plane), engines full of breath. It’s an encyclopedic book, chock-full of references of every kind, both personal and general . . . a book that strikes out to find America."

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"David Biespiel‘s Charming Gardeners is unlike any book I’ve read in a long time. Filled with epistolary poems, his book – despite being populated by the poet’s friends and family – is actually a work of great loneliness. In many ways, Biespiel’s journey is America’s, where the road is both a symbol of arrivals, but also departures, and in between is solitude."

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"[This] incandescent collection grabs hold of and portrays the ghosts of history, family, and place that captivate the poet."