In this masterfully offbeat second collection, Aaron Belz writes with a deadpan whimsy that fronts mischievously for keen cultural insights in poems like "You Bore Me," "Asking Al Gore About the Muse," and "Thirty Illegal Moves in the Cloud-Shape Game."- - -"Aaron Belz's poetry reminds us that poetry should be bright, friendly, surprising, and totally committed to everything but itself. Reading him is like dreaming of a summer vacation and then taking it." --John Ashbery "Belz is one of the brave few whose ears are attuned to the comic amid the contemporary. He writes in the tradition of Richard Brautigan, never afraid to let the awkward intensity of address and visual snap of juxtaposition hijack the poem's more solemn duties. Reading Belz is like watching an intimate comic performance; it's stand-up poetry meant for you alone." --Chris Martin "Bizarre images...are the norm in the collection, and at some point the reader will probably start to wonder if Belz will ever get to the 'serious' parts of the book. As the reader continues, though, they are likely to find that this propensity for finding strange relationships between objects has a certain magic to it, a kind of outrageous sincerity. Each conceit, each stanza, each line sparkles with such wonderful ambiguity of thought that is, paradoxically, a type of clarity; through Belz's absurdism, aspects of the human condition are illumined in unique, resonant fashion." --Adam Palumbo, The Rumpus "Aaron Belz has created a world all his own with Lovely, Raspberry from Persea Books. Let's call it Belzland. In both traditional and free verse poetry, he populates this world with strange sounds, strange sights and stranger fascinations. In Belz's playground people ask Al Gore about the muse, turn their face into a glowing pear and use Alberto V05 Extra Body Shampoo to make sense of their love life. The result is a slender, ribald romp across things ancient (Henry the Eighth and The Waste Land) and maddeningly modern (Mr. Potato Head, Skee Ball, Michael Bolton)." --Greg Gerke, Big Other