Cocklebur - by Erin Belieu (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Wisecracking and fierce, Belieu's new & selected interrogates gender, inheritance, and the stories that teach us how to live.

Cocklebur: New & Selected Poems gathers decades of Erin Belieu's work alongside a generous selection of new poetry. Moving fluently between the personal and the mythic, the collection engages fairy tales, Catholic iconography, family history, and the body's unruly knowledge to examine how we are taught to survive, love, and desire. Poems and their speakers are attuned to the hidden labor of care, alongside the quiet brutality embedded in domestic life and national narratives. Whether addressing grief, sexuality, faith, or American identity, the poems resist sentimentality, instead offering precision, wise-cracking wit, and a fierce emotional intelligence. In this retrospective lives a sustained attention to stories and how those stories teach us to survive. 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

"Though these poems are sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, it's the groaners and knee-slappers--poignant for never quite landing--that distinguish Belieu's style."--The New Yorker

"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."