Black Box Paperback – October 1, 2006

This book's most important poem is "In the Red Dress I Wear to Your Funeral." The poem is spoken through multiple voices: a borscht-belt comedian, a fairy tale protagonist, JFK assassination conspiracy theorist and a Grecian oracle without ever misguiding the reader into believing these are voices of the poet while still revealing the poet's "truth." In brief, these speakers are emotionally true despite being factually fictitious. To my reading, Belieu is in the lineage of notable women writers such as Denise Levertov, Adrienne Rich (see "Diving into the Wreck) and of course Sylvia Plath. There are also nearly genetic traits of e.e. cummings, Allen Ginsberg and Frederico Lorca. As others have written she is a poetry-sibling of the contemporary Josh Bell but also Olena Kalytiak Davis and Mark Bibbins. The aforementioned "Red Dress" reminds of the diction Aaron Kunin's "The Sore Throat."  And Her Soul Out Of Nothing (Brittingham Prize in Poetry) The Sore Throat & Other Poems No Planets Strike

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."