Black Box
Copyright © 2006
by Erin Belieu
Copper Canyon Press
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Black Box is a raw, intense book, fueled by a devastating infidelity. With her
marriage shattered, Erin Belieu sifts the wreckage for the black box, the record of
disaster. Propelled by a blistering and clarifying rage, she composed at fever pitch and
produced riveting, unforgettable poems, such as the ten-part sequence "In the Red Dress I
Wear to Your Funeral":
I root through your remains,
looking for the black box. Nothing left
but glossy chunks, a pimp's platinum
tooth clanking inside the urn. I play you
over and over, my beloved conspiracy,
my personal Zapruder film-look. . .
When Belieu was invited by the Poetry Foundation to keep a public journal on their new
website, readers responded to the Black Box poems, calling them "dark, twisted,
disturbed, and disturbing" and Belieu a "frightening genius." All true. —
from the publisher
Titled after the flight-data recording devices analyzed in plane-crash investigations,
Belieu's forceful third collection examines the wreckage of interpersonal disaster,
chiefly a nasty marital breakup. ... Belieu is also interested in how emotional extremity
makes
shameless performers of us all, an observation dramatized in the book's astonishing
centerpiece, the longer poem "In the Red Dress I Wear to Your Funeral."
— Publishers Weekly
Belieu's poems use a vernacular of their own to suggest a noir world of erotic innuendo
and red lights waiting to be run. — Neon
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The Extraordinary Tide
Copyright © 2001
Edited by Erin Belieu and Susan Aizenberg
Columbia University Press
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A collection of more than 400 poems by more than 100 different writers,
The Extraordinary Tide synthesizes and celebrates a new era of
poetry by women in America. Long overdue, the anthology includes America’s
most recognized women poets and those emerging as exciting new artists of
contemporary verse. The book also contains a forward by poet Eleanor Wilner
and short biographies of all the contributors. — from the jacket
An extraordinary and important anthology that anyone interested in
contemporary American poetry will want to read and cherish. — Alan
Shapiro
The delights of this anthology are in its plurality, its collection of
such a rich and varied sampling of that tide flooding
American shores. —
Eleanor Wilner
Reluctant as American poetry has been to embrace its own majority, the
almost inestimable variety, abundance, and accomplishment of this anthology
makes one shudder to think how half-hearted our national literature would
be without the voices that are gathered here. It’s as if, at last, Eurydice
had cleared the vast silence of the underworld, and in so doing she has
fashioned a music that enlarges the voice in all of us. — Sherod
Santos
Stunning in its accomplishment and breathtaking in scope, The
Extraordinary Tide is an anthology like no other: rather than merely
defining some very particular territory, the work of the women writers
gathered herein in fact gorgeously illuminates all of contemporary American
letters. — Rafael Campo
One had hoped that by this time there would be no need for an
anthology like The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American
Women, but its existence testifies to the continuing negative gender
politics of poetry. ... anyone who has doubted the
richness of poetry by women in the U.S. will no longer be able to
do so. — Publishers Weekly
The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women unequivocally hits its mark.
Read it as a textbook of contemporary poetry. Or read it as a comprehensive collection
of women poets. ... The women included in this book may all rise from the same chromosomal
wellspring, but the way each asserts herself as a poet could not be more diverse. The
Extraordinary Tide is an important book beyond its gender
specific objective and because of it. — Teri Grimm, Prairie Schooner
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Infanta
Copyright © 1995
by Erin Belieu
Copper Canyon Press
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Armed with humor, anger and sensuality, Erin Belieu fuses the discursive
methods
of fiction to a lyric impulse, resulting in a remarkable first book. With
unwavering
attention to telling detail, she explores a model's thoughts while posing,
or draws
portraits of people caught in ungainly moments of self-revelatory failure,
or captures
the bizarre systematic mental destruction of a fifteenth-century princess
at the hands
of her rapacious father, exposing the moments in which assumptions and
presumptions are subverted.
Selecting Infanta for publication in the National Poetry Series,
Hayden Carruth
has written, "The poems have a sophisticated urban chic that is both
attractive and
deceptive. Beneath their verbal glamour, which is considerable, they embody an
intelligence both sensual and political. They speak to the beleaguered
outposts
of compassion in our society. They are original, fresh, extraordinarily
skillful,
grounded at the same time in literary, including historical, awareness and
humane
contemporary concern. I hope they will be well and widely received." — from
the jacket
The poems of Erin Belieu's debut collection are both turbulent and serene.
There is a wild
wisdom here, an artfully composed spiritual/ sexual restlessness. Everywhere
in these poems, beneath their wry intelligence and tender humor,
we stand in the dark undercurrent of the caught breath. In Erin Belieu's
world we
know that we live at the edge of some terribly intimate and imminent
catastrophe
of either the heart or soul. — David St John
Here are freshness and art. Erin Belieu's writing about gender, love, history
encompasses many kinds of awareness — of feminist issues, of poetic conventions
of street-talk, of ideas — materials that she manages with her
own characteristic ebullience, a poetic intelligence that in
poems like "Erections," "For Catherine: Juana, Infanta of Navarre,"
and "Legend of the Albino Farm" attains outrageous comedy
and moral insight in a single, memorable gesture. Belieu's
Infanta is a first book that presents
not the imitative licks of a beginner but a distinctive new voice,
outpacing expectations. — Robert Pinsky
...lyric agility, intellectual curiosity, and deft
use of forms as well as free verse....The poems are
admirable in their diversity, not only of form but of tone: quizzical,
dismayed, amused, or
saddened. Various combinations of tones are called forth by the complexity
of our lives, and
create the sense that we can't quite know the world, or ourselves — a
sort of quantum
uncertainty about it all, as if the poet were changing reality by writing
it. ... her book is meant to be disturbing (among other effects),
and it is a book about "us" as much as about
"I." —
Boston Book Review
Belieu, born in
1965, is a young poet, and Infanta is a promising
volume. Belieu
ranges over a variety of subjects and styles, but
focuses most frequently
on relations between men and women. She works
well in traditional
form ... and makes good use of
blank verse in the volume's strongest poem,
"The Man Who Tried to
Rape You". ... among the most promising poets
to emerge from "Generation X." — Eclectic Literary Forum
Erin Belieu's Infanta, selected by Hayden Carruth in
the 1995 series, is an outstanding piece of work. One
can see right away what drew Carruth to these poems:
the tensions between humor and anger, the intelligent
eroticism that threads through many of the poems, the
off-beat subject matter, and what Robert Pinsky called
Belieu's "distinctive new voice." — Amazon.com
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One Above & One Below
Copyright © 2000
by Erin Belieu
Copper Canyon Press
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Erin Belieu's debut volume, Infanta, was selected for the 1995
National Poetry Series and quickly sold through its and both
both The Washington Post and the National Book Critics Circle named it as one of the
best poetry books of the year.
In her second collection, One Above & One Below,
Belieu again seduces her readers with a precise and delicious language.
As she tries to make sense out of what constitutes the truest self, she ranges from the
elegiac horizons of the Great Plains to an equally open embrace of a more
frenzied, cosmopolitan world. Whether angry or humorous, formal or free, Belieu's poems
"dive and soar," gathering an exhilarating, exquisite momentum. — from the jacket
The spirit of Erin Belieu's One Above & One Below is "knotted to the gristle of the
body." It's an open-twenty-four-hours-drop-ins-welcome-all-American-vernacular,
notwithstanding a cephalophoric hike up Montamartre. She's nervy and "titian-haired like Nancy
Drew." Under her roof, even the moon leaves a grease spot and the dead are pictured up close
and personal, including you." — CD Wright
Belieu's poems dive and soar ... One Above & One Below is a rare poetic mix.
— Marie Ponsot
Belieu ... excels at a witty, drawn-out vernacular that requires a bit
more space. Of her native Nebraska, she writes: "If you ever have a child,/ remember to assure
her
that/ one cannot really die of boredom, just an expression/ folks use to pass the time, as one
milo field
drifts/ into another and the same decrepit shed, year after/ year, threatens to collapse."
This poet is wedded to a dark muse, one who is "busy rubbing lotion in her fresh tattoo."
But she has a youthful, upbeat spirit. ... Belieu is a young poet worth watching.
—
Library Journal
This second collection speaks in many voices: the edgy sophisticate of the first poem, whose
muse is "like the gorgeous dykes/ who rule my health-club locker room"; the singer of the
Western plains who begins "Plainsong," "He lived in a sod house,/ a formal nest of grass";
a different kind of all-American poet who plunges into italicized memory: "I smell the
sugary,/ acid stink rising/ from the wood-slatted truck bed,/ and hear the glass-rattle
bell/ the green bottles will make when my father loads them." — Publishers Weekly
Belieu has met and exceeded the expectations of her early readers. — Boston Book Review
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What the Critics Say
Bibliography
