One Above & One Below: New Poems

Erin's poetry style is imminently readable, and a lot of the poems in One Above & One Below are positively fun. One of my favorites was "On Being Fired Again." The poet's wry sense of humor is evident even she deals with darker issues. She also has a remarkable ability to fashion a poem in a form to fit the content - you can tell the workmanship behind even casual-seeming phrases. I also recommend Infanta, which showcases a different, more melancholy facet of this writer.

A spectacular second volume, this group of poems features settings as culturally central as Paris, but finds its home mostly in the badlands of Nebraska. Belieu places people in the most quotidian of circumstances (hanging out in the Dairy Barn parking lot, cooking stew in a pioneering sod house)and finds a way in each instance to reveal the richness of her character's imagination via an exact and lyrically rich procession of images. I recommend this book to anyone interested in the best that the youngest generation of American poets has to offer.