Author: Daniel Feinberg Publisher: If a Leaf Falls Press (2024) 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.”
