Anthony Procopio Ross reviews
Of Being Neighbors
by Daniel Biegelson

Daniel Biegelson’s Of Being Neighbors offers readers reasons to look past the self, and in doing so, charts a route back to the “other” that defines us so entirely.

Daniel Biegelson’s Of Being Neighbors creates a space for readers to ask the most difficult question, ‘Who are we in the face of others?’

Daniel Biegelson’s Of Being Neighbors, a title and collection consistently by inspired by George Oppen’s Of Being Numerous, welcomes the redacted and replaced into the many iterations of self that populate our lives each day.

Replace I with you. Replace clouds with branches. Exculpate my heart. Replace my heart with
another organ. The eyes. With iris aperture. Or. Hear the body with the body. Extinguish
the inner ear. Imagine the scrollwork.

This work contemplates the minds, hearts, and voices of many within our grander neighborhoods of cultures, identity, and time. Neighbors ranging from, but not limited to, Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King Jr., and Walt Whitman join his multitudinous verse on these pages.

This is a poetry that exists beyond the world of the singular, where, as the poet writes, “We are dead and we are not dead / all all our lives of numbered evening suture into one.” The illusion of duality is often brought into question, especially in his “Neighbors” sequence, where each pluralism is shattered, sifted through, and beheld.

Readers are left with the question, when we redact the long list of divisions that populates our waking lives, what are we left with? The answer to which lies at the heart of Biegelson’s winsome first full-length book of poems.

Daniel Biegelson is the author of the book of being neighbors (Ricochet Editions) and 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 and an MA from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He hails from New Jersey and lives near Kansas City with his wife and two kids.

Anthony Procopio Ross is a MFA graduate of Minnesota State University, Mankato. Originally from Kansas City, Mo., he serves as a Poetry Editor for deadpeasant, a counter-cultural literary magazine of arts and writing. Anthony's poems appear in the McNeese Review, the Laurel Review, Bear Review, Levee Magazine, and others. As an Andreas Creative Writing Fellow, he has read his work with Ross Gay, and has taught creative writing courses at Minnesota State University, Mankato. Additionally, he also led creative writing workshops for adults with developmental disabilities, teaching with Cow Tipping Press.