Glitter Bomb

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY JUL 21, 2014

"There's no I in team,/ but there's one in bitterness/ and one in failure," writes Belz (Lovely, Raspberry) in his third collection. In fact, that's the entirety of the poem "Team," and Belz continues throughout the book in a similar manner, riffing off idioms, pop culture, and the common language of banality in poems that straddle the line between light verse and narrative poetics. "I'm starting with the man/ in the convex mirror," he exclaims in a poem titled "Michael Jashbery." Later, we find him reminiscing, "You had a bonnet and a puffy dress / Puff Mommy I called you (as a joke)." Belz's main mode is humor, and while "I'm not trying to pick a fight here," he claims, "I am trying to pick a bunch of other stuff,/ though, such as a bone, with you." The subject matter occasionally darkens and can even be strangely affecting (as in the poem "On the Death of Leslie Nielsen"), but Belz rarely shirks from an attempted punch line, even in that darkness: "My new band name/ the Macronauts really/ captures the largeness/ of what it's like/ to be in Los Angeles." Belz may have mastered the tongue-in-cheek, but the myriad pop references rarely yield much substance.