SOME SUN by Daniel Feinberg
130 x 197mm, 72 pages, Black & white printing, Perfect bound, Softcover, 2024
For some years, Daniel Feinberg’s poetry has been a secret worth keeping. Part of a generation of poets that includes Ariana Reines, Jon Leon, David Berman and Dan Hoy, the author of several impossible to obtain chapbooks, the artist’s books Bora Bora Bora (2015) and To Life (2018), editor of the iconic short-lived poetry magazine Soft Targets, his work has proven quietly yet distinctly influential.
Psychedelic and real, elegiac and hopeful, the poems collected in Some Sun take the author’s home of Marseille as a subject to venerate and fantasise with – this is Marseille in the afterlight of Miami, the scene of life-changing sunsets, Jewish mysticism and Afrofuturism, Rimbaud and Claude McKay, the invention of the bikini, an endlessly scrolling sea – a place where a poet can be a family man: “my family just happens to be jazz / nightclubs on a Japanese colonized Mars / in 2075.”
Poetry is validated as the great reconfigurer of emotion and perception, a sort of cryptocurrency, an evil order where a rhyme is true, wildflowers are woke, and it routinely storms indoors. Fluorescent, anti-authority, a little wasted, the book stakes everything on the old money of beauty, transformation, magic and syntax, unending love. “Claro the misery to mystery”, the poet says, and whether he means Floridian oblivion or thick Paris shade, if you hang around the light can change everything. Is it what you wanted? “Some sun / some don’t.”
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