Poet Aaron Belz at The Pink Door Monday January 28, 2008

Aaron Belz offers a poetry of exhilaration and exuberance where the self is drowned in a flood of pop cultural referents fading as quickly as a television commercial or a movie trailer. Following William Carlos Williams's dictum that poetry should be about "those things which lie under the direct scrutiny of the senses, close to the nose," Belz fearlessly embraces postmodern phenomena like vacuous celebrity or spam mail.

Belz writes poetry in his hometown of St. Louis, Missouri. His work has appeared in Boston Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Black Clock, and other places, and his first full-length book, The Bird Hoverer, was published by BlazeVOX in 2007. Another of his manuscripts, Clementines, was selected as a runner-up for the 2006 Marsh Hawk Press contest, by Denise Duhamel, who writes: "Aaron Belz is a gravely hilarious poet. . . . [H]is ferocious intelligence, his love of glitz, and his wry take on relationships (both human and animal) are irresistible. Belz's voice is bold, wise, and inimitable."