White Asparagus
by D.R. Belz
Apprentice House, 2010
978-1934074534, 246 pp., $18.95

In White Asparagus,Baltimore-based writer D. R. Belz uses 20 essays, 15 poems, 13 short stories, and three cartoons to lure the reader on an adventure. In his first anthology, he exercises his acerbic sense of humor and observes social and cultural ironies with sharp wit that echoes Jonathan Swift with his cutting satire. At first glance, Belz's easy-to-read writing style can be deceptive, promising a fun and laughter-filled journey, populated by an array of quirky characters for which Baltimore has become known: Gus, the Army Vet who fudged his credentials enough to land a job teaching undergraduate literature courses until the powers that be found out and he landed working a line in a Hampden toothbrush factory before ending up homeless; Dander, a grandfather, torches his own house because he thought it was haunted by 100-year-old ghosts; the narrator of the title story "White Asparagus," who ends up taking over his father's hardware store just before he was to begin a teaching fellowship at Johns Hopkins; and more.

By relying on ordinary snippets of life, Belz exposes the absurdities and bleak underbelly of life, of human nature, of culture and society, and explores mundane and serious conflicts that arise between people and also examines unexpected conflicts between strangers that can either derail or uplift them. Divided into three sections—essays, poetry, and stories—the book also celebrates the best side of human nature, too.

The essays section offers seven or eight essays that mock the cultural and social traits while demonstrating the absurdity of consumerism in pieces such as "ValuesRUs.com," that reads like ad copy extolling readers to give the gift of "moral values" for Christmas to those folks "who have everything," and in "What Things Cost," a satirical exploration of the price of things being artificially inflated due to an abstraction known as "prevailing market conditions," where he writes: "Remember that big chunky set of carved wood salad bowls and utensils you got as a wedding gift? Again, forty or fifty bucks. Could they be made of—perchance—gopher wood? And what the heck is gopher wood anyway?"

This section also offers up recipes unlike that you'd find in any cookbook, absurd descriptions of "inventions that never get off the ground," such as "the When Bracelet" and "Dashboard Television."

The second part of the book focuses on poetry, and this section shines with an energy of a newborn sun. "At My First Bar Mitzvah," the Roman Catholic Belz writes, "I was forty-six and one impressed Catholic when his mentors helped Jake embrace a scroll as big as he was," and ends with the image of the guests tossing sweet candies at the Bar Mitzvah boy. In the poem "Ignus Fatuus," Belz writes "the filament burns brightest just before the end," a line that functions on three levels: the life of a filament in a light bulb, a direct reference to the grandfather's life in the poem; and life span of man.

Short stories, including the brilliant title piece, "White Asparagus," comprise the third section, a fine cap to the previous two. The stories feature ordinary people facing extraordinary situations. In the title story, a doctor emotionally neglects is ailing wife, while the protagonist and narrator of the story bears witness and attempts to sweeten the wife's final days; in the other stories, a homeless man finds a baby in the trash on Christmas morning; a young postulate in "There Angels Dance," unsure of his decision to enter the priesthood, goes on an early morning run only to happen across a beautiful woman with a small boy tossing stones from a bridge onto the traffic on I-83.

All the characters in Belz' collection could be EveryMan, each of us, ordinary souls finding ourselves faced with unexpected events that profoundly change us. Whimsical cartoons or drawings divide each section, adding to its light-hearted feel, further masking the heaviness hidden deeper within each section. Belz, a professional writer and writing instructor for more than 30 years, brings readers his "real and imagined worlds," as promised in the forward by Rafael Alvarez, with the hope we can glimpse the absurdity and frightening future "and learn to enjoy it" as his former college professor, author James M.Cain, once predicted about Belz's work in a note he'd scrawled to his student in a flyleaf of his novel, Cain X 3.—Rosalia Scalia