Black Box

The sharp-tongued poems in Erin Belieu's third book are as topically adventurous and linguistically playful as those that appear in "Infanta" and "One Above & One Below." On the whole, though, this book is significantly more intense, more raw and uncompromising, than Belieu's previous works. Many of the poems seem to be the product of some emotional bombs--unexpected motherhood and marital infidelity, in particular--that exploded in the not-too-distant past, strewing hard shrapnel through the poet's life. This is not a book for the faint of heart, for those who balk at verse that lavishes attention on an anthropomorphized blow-up doll ("Of the Poet's Youth") or engages in metaphorical gunplay ("Shooting Range"). The poems in "Black Box" have, at times, a filthy mouth, a hair trigger, all the illogical elegance of a B movie. But for those readers whose poetic interests lie somewhere beyond sedate paeans to nature or simplistic domestic lyrics, Belieu's coy sense of humor and mature, intelligently-wrought mashups of vulgarity and lyricism will prove seductive. These poems are simultaneously unsparing and gentle, bloody and luminous, meditative and impulsive, shot through with religious allusions and extended treatises on a panoply of pop culture-infused subjects. Each poem in "Black Box" is undeniably gutsy and alive.

Along with Josh Bell, this is one of the few poets that can take the natural depravity of human beings and spin it so many ways; it can be funny, sad, loathing, contempuous, bitter, bitter-sweet, etc., but it never goes unearned and each poem seems to stem from some form of loss or injustice. Any poet that can take the darkest side of human nature and "tell it slant," as they say, to make you laugh or sit in a sublime kind of shock is worth reading... so few poets can make "silk out of a sow's ear."

Before I reveal what I think of Erin Belieu's poetry, a confession: We were classmates once. It was in graduate school, where our interactions were so infrequent, they barely qualified us to identify each other in a police lineup. So understand that I have no incentive beyond the quality of her work to either praise or condemn it. That said, Erin's poetry is stunning. I'll throw out more clichés -- raw, bold, witty, honest, haunting, powerful, dynamic, illuminating. It's so good that if Milton Berle were a poet and alive, he would steal it. I generally avoid poetry the way I do needles and babies, but Erin's work is just that impressive. It's a fairly safe bet that many more readers will discover her, but now's your chance to get ahead of the curve, to be able to say, like me, "I knew her when . . ." I suspect you won't be disappointed.