In Soft Launch, Aaron Belz takes what might seem normal to other people—a 1/3 full bottle of Prell left in a musty shower stall of a mountain cabin, for instance—and turns it over in the light until its true self emerges, a thirsty dolphin lost in the piney woods. Or so he claims. Regardless, in these poems, the sentimentalized experience of middle-age is about not just connectedness but overconnectedness, and to all the wrong things. Hyperaware, hypervigilant, and abundantly alert, Belz surveys the banal, the grinding quotidian, and asks not, “Is this all?” but rather “Isn’t this not all?” And then he bows his head either to pray or to nap.
