Daniel Biegelson reimagines the lyric “I” as a neighborhood. Hybrids of influences and interlocutors—ranging from Julian of Norwich to Muriel Rukeyser, Sam Cooke, and Adrienne Rich—reveal the permeable borders of self, family, and nation. Biegelson’s poems throw us “back onto the shards / of questions we thought we had answered” and—among the ruins of violent prejudice, economic collapse, and ecological extinction—find in those questions a space of reinvention and potentiality.
In poetry and prose, Biegelson meditates on the complexity of Jewish identity, the responsibility of parenthood, and the experience of community and isolation in a politically polarized environment. With George Oppen’s linguistic precision and Walt Whitman’s ecstatic revelry, of being neighbors dwells where the limits of language give way to possibility, allowing us to imagine the liberatory moment when “maybe, someday, past the evening eclipse / past forgiveness… We’ll see a beach cleared of connotations—bright and ready to be returned.”
Reviews:
On Of Being Neighbors by Tyler Truman Julian @ The Shore
Of being Neighbors reviewed by Alison Hramiak @ Grist
Of Being Neighbors Review by Anthony Procopio Ross @ The Inflectionist
Praise:
"Daniel Biegelson has given us a tour de force meditation on being a self among others. It’s a rich and difficult context rendered with a deep caring and brilliance that brings several strands and achievements of 20th Century poetics (especially the Objectivists) into our historical present. It’s a startlingly intelligent and moving read. When we talk about the importance of art, we’re talking of books like this."
— John Gallaher, author of A Brand New Spacesuit
"Biegelson enacts a musing and very moving, contemplation-through-conversation in this rich collection. That conversation is with the neighbors, we presume, but also with a wide range of neighbors in thought and feeling as disparate as Sam Cooke, Aesop, Chicken Little, and you. Dear you, he says, and then Dear me, and in that linguistic flip, we get a glimpse of the exceptionally attentive and complex interaction with language that drives the whole book, and drives it always toward the ineffable in both the scared and the secular. “Is there a gift without a giver,” he asks. This book seems to come from there."
—Cole Swensen, author of On Walking On
“The sheer velocity of Daniel Biegelson’s collection of being neighbors made me feel like I was riding a kayak on a tsunami. These poems charge forward, asking big questions and taking enormous risks, bringing together the ecstatic and the intimate, while remaining grounded in erudition and ethics. Biegelson’s expansive vision is grounded in Jewish thought and Yiddishkeit, but with an outward focus that takes in thinkers from Aesop to Wilco; he places a well curated set of quotations into the poems like tiles into a mosaic. Ultimately, this book wants to know how to live in human community, how to commune with neighbors, how to return to the commons that have been privatized out of existence. This book continuously opens up onto inquiry, rather than arriving at answers, and yet it is precisely the guide I need now.”