Wild Civility

David Biespiel’s long poetic lines crackle with rhythmic energy and a jazzy, bittersweet richness of language. Rolling out across the page like darkly luminous highways, his innovative, nine-line "American sonnets" promise adventure, offering a variant on the sonnet form that is both lyric and dramatic and bringing his masterful formal inventiveness to free verse. "I’ve come to imagine the nine-line sonnet to be like one of those classic Thunderbirds," says Biespiel, "something distinctly A...