(Reviewer’s note: I don’t know much about Aaron or about poetry. You can click here for samples and a quick check on Aaron’s background. Or you could go to Costco, then hire a licensed private investigator. Just depends on what kind of samples and background check you want.)
One book of poetry, two days of pleasure (mixed with confusion) for the reader.
The author rarely swings and misses at that third strike. Never metaphor at a five-‘n’-dime
he couldn’t flip to readers and leave ’em at sixes and sevens.
Does
blank verse shoot lead or
blanks? Does this poetry earn
blank stares?
Does Glitter Bomb? Answer left
blank. (For an atom-split second, just wait.)
Was the bomb dropped? Diffused? Answer right
now: all the Belz, most of the whistles. Almost all flowers, just a few thistles.
Do not ask for whom the Belz beguiles. His toll fare is fair, for his free verse brings smiles.
In some, low overhead, genius-saturated. In 1/2 of 1/2, my crazy culture much-exegeted.
In sum: 1/2 genius, 1/2 cultural saturation craziness that’s over my lowly head. (Epexegetical much?)
The first poem feels like a second chance, rising on the third day, sallying forth, a ship’s captain—my captain—and a fifth of gin.
Can intoxicated poems deep-six the seven seas of reader’s regret for my overly prosaic sins? Spoiler alert: yes.
Do the lines lumber, like a rusty Olds eighty-eight?
Spoiler alert: nein
Behold, young poems that glitter. Light and shiny as tin,
ever-new, wise like an elf,
riffing—even rhyming—until the clock Belz strikes twelve.
I’m Cinderella, these poems are glass slippers. They once were Lost, these 4 8 15 16 23 42 61 poems and now I am found. Amazingly gracious, and glittery ever after.
At least until I return to the Inhumanities to read, idk, Collected Essays or Assays into Collectivism.
But while you watch me careening back down my academic cliff,
Spent like a beer at Cheers falling from the cleft chin of Cliff
Note:
some will want CliffsNotes, a treble clef on which to transpose
Belz’s ringing, confusing,
pleasing notes.
But they’re not so much
de-noted as detonated. Not so much
composed as decomposed like fertilizer that fuels the
bomb, man. Just try transposing that.
I did, and I’m all blown up, not at all composed.
It’s totes my faults the Glitter earthquake exposed.
Jason volleys great riffs from the Great Rift Valley in East Africa. Follow him on Twitter and on Facebook if you dig lepidoptera. His latest book is Imitating God in Christ.