Description

Ricochet Editions, paperback

Publication Date: September 14, 2021

Publisher Marketing:Daniel Biegelson reimagines the lyric “I” as a neighborhood. Hybrids of influences and interlocutorsranging from Julian of Norwich to Muriel Rukeyser, Sam Cooke, and Adrienne Richreveal the permeable borders of self, family, and nation. Biegelson’s poems throw us “back onto the shards / of questions we thought we had answered” andamong the ruins of violent prejudice, economic collapse, and ecological extinctionfind 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 connotationsbright and ready to be returned.”