Review by New York Times Review
Here's something unusual: poetry that's fun to read. "Slant Six" isn't sweet, thank goodness, or lighthearted - in her fourth book, Belieu grumbles, editorializes, complains, digresses. She's speedy and funny, sarcastic more than ironic, chatty sometimes to a fault. Her voice-driven, politically inflected poems are full of American news, specifically of a middle-class working mother's striving and strife. The Florida panhandle, Belieu's home, is a frequent setting. In Belieu's world anything visionary seems a near impossibility. "Poem of Philosophical and Parental Conundrums Written in an Election Year" finds the speaker's 7-year-old son declaring from the back seat, "Mama, I HATE/Republicans." This sets off a meditation on evangelicals, ex-husbands, Jeff Koons, Internet flame-wars and the startle when a child "nicknamed by his teachers/'The Radiating Joy Machine'" belts out the word "hate" "like he absolutely means it." Belieu captures the pace and skitter of the mind during driving, during multitasking, during parenting. At the end of this long poem she notes, as if waking from reverie, "our tidy neighborhood/of houses with doorway flags promoting pineapples/and football teams," thinking "maybe I got it right this time,/... this doesn't have to/be the thing Jude talks about someday in therapy." But she immediately rejects that self-serving thought to observe how children work "to perfect the obstinate and beautiful mystery/that every soul ends up being to every other." Thus the quotidian disquiet of "Slant Six" yields to its own kind of vision.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 8, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
In her accomplished fourth collection, Belieu depicts the everyday through moments of practical but luminous self-knowledge. Slant Six, the title, appropriately refers to both a Chrysler engine and poetic near-rhymes. The Body Is a Big Sagacity places a Nietzsche-quoting speaker in a Costco parking lot as she watches a man of small stature emerge from a giant truck and bravely make his way through the bulk-parceled world. Recycled, rewired, product of / genes and whatever our mamas thought / to smoke, the spirit gets no vote, Fred, the wry, wise speaker observes. Politics, pop culture, and parenthood appear here along with reflections on our collective moments of hypocrisy and hope. 12-Step, one of the most resonant entries, begins innocuously with a meditation about lighthouses, then the speaker gathers speed and confidence and reaches a risky but profound one-word stanza myself before ending with a haunting inversion of the Serenity Prayer used by Alcoholics Anonymous. Amid the quips and the elegant observations about immortality, Belieu's speakers never forget their responsibilities, or their possibilities.--Alessio, Carolyn Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Belieu oscillates between dark humor, self-consciousness, and pointed satire in a fourth collection that's equal-opportunity in its critique. In the world of these poems, no one is innocent; everyone is confined to the complexity, absurdity, and, above all, fallibility of their human condition. "O America," Belieu writes, "we don't mean to disappoint,/ but every lover comes/ with fulsome jiggle,/ some pudding/ packed in the U-Haul,/ a mole we want to believe/ could be viewed as a beauty mark." It is often smaller, quotidian gestures and occurrences that serve to ignite the poems' fire. In "Time Machine," an act of road rage on the part of a Volvo driver with a "Commit Random Acts of Kindness" bumper sticker leads to a brilliant meditation on the nature of memory and identity: "Time unspools, and here I sit/ road-rashed, knotted in the service/ ditch of my humiliation." Anchoring the work is a conversational, lyrical speaker willing to implicate herself as part of the political and social constructs she criticizes, as when she depicts a Southern American culture still reeling from its history of social injustice, and even the Civil War: "Don't tell us/ history. Nobody hearts a cemetery/ like we do." It's a fantastic collection; Belieu desires not to dress issues up but confront them. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
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