Aaron Belz

When Aaron Belz lived in Hillsborough, we once made him write about John Hodgman. That’s because if American poetry has a Hodgman—read: a friendly ironist in a bow tie—it’s Belz, who combines poetic seriousness (one of his books was blurbed by John Ashbery, for chrissake) and malignant puns with a dry professorial persona, so you can never quite tell if he’s kidding. He’s back with Soft Launch (Persea Books, September 2019), which dissolves the history of poetry—the sonnet, the love poem, the aubade, etc.—into a froth of dad jokes, text messages, stand-up riffs, reply-all emails, and other modern mortifications. “Love,” in its entirety, reads, “We fit together perfectly / like two halves of an ape.” (Russell Edson much?) “Outrage” is a straight-faced groaner: “I threw up my hands in disgust: / Why had I eaten my hands?” Sure, there’s longing and even beauty mixed with the shtick, but in a book whose dedication says, “Because I’m worth it,” you’re here for the shtick. Belz reads at Hillsborough Wine Company at 2:00 p.m. on Saturday and at So & So Books at 6:00, with Josh Tvrdy and Ali Wood. —Brian Howe