Of Being Neighbors

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."

Poetry. Jewish Studies.

Daniel Biegelson is the author of the chapbook Only the Borrowed Light (VERSE). He serves as the Director of the Visiting Writers Series at Northwest Missouri State University, where he also works as an editor for The Laurel Review. He holds an MFA from the University of Montana, an MA from the University of Massachusetts--Amherst, hails from New Jersey and lives near Kansas City with his wife and children.