A Web del Sol Featured Writer


Erin Belieu

Or instead you've been the impetus, unfaithful, deceitful, maybe only the hapless object of some other person's desire thinking that, for all their protestations of love, you might as well be a bathroom fixture or bookend.


In 1994, Erin Belieu's poetry collection entitled Infanta, won the National Poetry Series, and was selected by Hayden Carruth for pulbication by Copper Canyon Press. Erin graduated with an M.A. Creative Writing from Boston University in 1995 and received the Rona Jaffe Foundation Award. The following year she became a Bread Loaf Fellow. Currently, Erin is managing editor of AGNI magazine and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts

Erin Belieu, from FROM The Exploding Madonna
    The chrome shines until it stings, reflecting
    The women's sad asses as they shuffle
    In papery gowns from the locker room:
    Fun house butts or the elongated and
    Elegantly dead derrieres of a
    Mannerist's pietà, depending on
    How kind the angle, how soft the focus.
    The big blonde nurse is a sugar mountain
    Inserting ivs all around the room.
    Hair spun to confection, sticky in sea-foams,

What Robert Pinsky has to say about Erin's work in Infanta:
Here are freshness and art. Erin Belieu's writing about gender, love, history encompasses many kinds of awareness - of feminine issues, of poetic conventions, of street-talk, of ideas - materials that she manages with her own characteristic ebullience, a poetic intelligence that in poems like 'Erections,' 'For Catherine: Juana, Infanta of Navarre,' and 'Legend of the Albino Farm' attains outrageous comedy and moral insight in a single, memorable gesture. Belieu's Infanta is a first book that presents not the imitative licks of a beginner but a distinctive new voice, outpacing expectations."

Selections from Erin Belieu's work:
Many of these selections were first published in Infanta, by Copper Canyon Press.

Poetry, Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Erin's Vitae