David Biespiels Charming Gardeners (University of Washington Press, 2013) is unlike any book Ive read in a long time. Filled with epistolary poems, his book despite being populated by the poets friends and family is actually a work of great loneliness. In many ways, Biespiels journey is Americas, where the road is both a symbol of arrivals, but also departures, and in between is solitude. On the surface, Biespiels poems seem like the private meditations of one man. However, his poems encompass each of us, socially and politically, by illuminating our nations contradictory character: a longing for enchantment in a disenchanted world. The poems in Charming Gardeners live between the wilderness and the civilized and the poet, finding himself in this zone of uncertainty, does what any of us would do: call out to those we love. In our conversation we discuss his years in Boston and D.C., the Attic Institute in Portland, the poetry wars, and so much more. I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did