Cocklebur - by Erin Belieu (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A career-spanning collection from an unflinching poet of extraordinary emotional precision.

In celebration of a major voice in American letters, Erin Belieu's Cocklebur: New & Selected Poems gathers decades of work alongside a generous selection of new poems. Wide ranging in style, subject and structure, this collection confronts with unsentimental clarity both tender intimacies and grief, as well as the absurdities of what it is to be a human. Belieu considers with fierce emotional intelligence and intellectual rigor the power dynamics and quiet brutality often embedded in our domestic lives and national narratives. Whether addressing sexuality, the sustainability of faith in one's self or others, or American identity, the poems are penetrating and precise. Cocklebur is a portrait of a poet unafraid to look directly at our personal and collective histories--what they permit, what they erase, and what they ask us to carry.

Review Quotes

Praise for Erin Belieu

"Belieu channels an updated American idiom, one of stubborn in-betweenhood. Like the plainspoken poetry that plumbed the depths of American consciousness in the 20th century, Belieu trawls the shallows of today's America and finds just as much caught in its oily reflections as in its murkier subcurrents. It's '[b]etter, ' she suggests, 'to forget perfection.'"--Michael Andor Brodeur, Boston Globe

"Her gifts--for clarity, consolidation, humor and moments of hard-earned feeling--are old-fashioned ones. She's a comedian of the human spirit, in league with poets from Frank O'Hara through Deborah Garrison and Tony Hoagland. Sex and longing, too, are among this poet's primal subjects. About these things Ms. Belieu is so blissfully conscious and verbal."--Dwight Garner, New York Times

"[Belieu's] latest collection toggles between lighthearted comedy and deep-seated loss, using paradox as a prerequisite for beauty... For every joke in Come-Hither Honeycomb, there's something tragic on the other side of the scale."--Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker

"There are many lives that you could lead, but there's only the one that you live. With both wit and grace, Belieu has mastered the art of stumbling toward that reality."--Adroit Journal

"There is a wild wisdom here, an artfully composed spiritual/sexual restlessness. Everywhere in these poems, beneath their wry intelligence and tender humor, we stand in the dark undercurrent of the caught breath."--David St. John

"Here are freshness and art. Erin Belieu's writing about gender, love, history encompasses many kinds of awareness--of feminist issues, of poetic conventions, of street-talk, of ideas--materials that she manages with her own characteristic ebullience, a poetic intelligence...a distinctive new voice, outpacing expectations."--Robert Pinsky

About the Author

Born in Nebraska, Erin Belieu earned an MA from Boston University and an MFA from Ohio State University. Belieu's work focuses on gender, love, and history, filtering wide-ranging subject matter through a variety of theoretical frameworks. She often addresses feminist issues and uses poetic conventions and street talk. Belieu is the author of many books of poetry, including Come-Hither Honeycomb (2020); Slant Six (2014); Black Box (2006), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; One Above, One Below (2000); and Infanta (1995), selected by Hayden Carruth for the National Poetry Series. Belieu coedited, with Susan Aizenberg, the anthology The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women (2001).
Belieu has received admiring reviews for her poetry throughout her writing career. Book critic Dwight Garner in the New York Times says "Belieu is a poet who can't abide pretension," and "She's a comedian of the human spirit, in league with poets from Frank O'Hara, to Deborah Garrison, to Tony Hoagland."