Lovely, Raspberry: Poems
ISBN 978-0-89255-359-4
Persea Books, 2010
80 pages, pbk.
$15
Reviewed by Joseph Harrington
“You expect me to tell you about the interior of the room/ in which I’m typing this, and connect that to my feelings,” begins Aaron Belz’ second full-length poetry collection, Lovely, Raspberry. Readers of his first book (The Bird Hoverer) needn’t be told that he won’t make that facile connection. Like some of the poems in that volume, this one proceeds to elaborately eviscerate contemporary “mainstream” poetry, with its predictable rhetorical moves and taken-for-granted subjectivity. At the same time, it dives into one of Belz’ major concerns: the ultimate impossibility of easy connections – whether between lovers, reader and writer, word and referent, subject and self. “Lets put our heads together/ and try to think up a third room unknown to either of us” – this book is that room. But by the same token, You can’t connect with I: “I cannot even begin to do it, for I am a ranch boy/ and not even a very good one; I live in El Bandito, Texas.” Like the other poems in Lovely, Raspberry, “Direction” takes a detour down the rabbit hole, to a place weird, hilarious, and utterly unexpected – even by the writer, one infers.
