Black Box

by Erin Belieu

Overview

“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

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781556592515
Publisher:	Copper Canyon Press
Publication date:	10/01/2006
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 7.50(h) x 0.20(d)

About the Author

Erin Belieu was born and raised in Nebraska and educated at the University of Nebraska, Ohio State, and Boston University. She is the author of three collections of poetry. Her debut, Infanta, was selected for the National Poetry Series and named one of the best books of that year by Library Journal, the National Book Critics' Circle, and Washington Post.

Editorial Reviews

Antipathy is Belieu's muse. Even her celebratory poems celebrate acts of defiance…Belieu is scrupulous enough to find room in her poems both for blind rage and a recognition of rage's blindness.
—The New York Times

Eric McHenry

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: "there wasn't a ribald// particular I didn't come to know:// the yoga instructress on Valentine's Eve,/ the xeroxed erotica files// arranged by body part." The poems' formal composure belies an anger so thoroughgoing it threatens at times to become simplistic ("This day's so blue, so pretty, let's smash it under glass"), but an equally relentless black humor shows the poet knows she's acting out. Belieu (One Above, One Below, 2000) 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." Here the poet imagines a broken marriage as a car crash you only half survive, unleashing a fury so spectacular it takes on the dimensions of myth: "I lift my scarlet tail above your grave/ and let the idiot villagers take me/ in torchlight/ one by one by one by one...." (Nov.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

With echoes of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, the free verse and prose poems in Belieu's latest focus on love and death. When Belieu finds the fine point where the two meet, she is capable of elegant imagery as in these lines: "Teach me to survive you/ Tell me, what kind/ won't choose these awful flowers?/ Who refuses this bleating, urgent pink?" But often this collection settles for less. Although "Epithalamion," which is reminiscent of Hughes's "Crow," captures the British poet's rhythm, it doesn't have the power of his imagery. Nor does the tender though coarse poem, "The Birthmark," for Belieu's son (suggestive of Plath's "Ariel") ever rise to the height of its predecessor. Self-absorbed, heavy with sexual innuendoes, many of these poems take themselves too seriously, which limits their effectiveness and diminishes their universality. As in Belieu's prize-winning Infanta, the best work here is edgy, unsentimental, and unsparing. Alliteration-driven, these poems are lighthearted with a dark edge-conversational until Belieu pulls the rug out from under the line with the acerbic but always right observation. Suitable for larger public libraries.-Diane Scharper, Towson Univ., MD Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal