Lovely, Raspberry: Poems [Paperback]

Not every reader will take to a poem that begins, "You bore me. So be it./ I bore you and enjoy doing it." Then there's the line, "I have been thinking about the love-hat relationship," which may provoke a few Bronx cheers. Still, there is room in this twittering world for some oddly resonant deadpan absurdity, especially when it's concise and readable, as are most of the poems in Belz's second collection (after The Bird Hoverer): "I sat with my head sort of hanging—in the tiled atrium./ I sat in the tiled atrium—with my head sort of hanging." Though he evokes the hip coastal schools, Belz is essentially Midwestern and excels at transforming folksiness into dissonance. And he is best when he goes beyond silly, as in "Worms," a shrewd depiction of the human mind couched as a treatise on alternate modes of transportation: "Cyclists, as a rule, think bikers are cheating,/ because they have engines. Pedestrians, in turn,/ think cyclists are cheating... People in wheelchairs think pedestrians/ have a leg up, for obvious reasons...." VERDICT You'll want to put this book down, but you probably won't. Recommended.—Ellen Kaufman, Baruch Coll., New York - Library Journal

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