Plahm invents a fruit and makes it irresistible. The “RazzleDazzleBerry” exists nowhere in nature but feels utterly real on the page—its compound name suggests razzle (flash, spectacle), dazzle (brilliance, bedazzlement), and berry (something small, sweet, natural, holdable in the palm). The poem opens with the precision of a food photograph: a single berry on a platter of pure white, a chef’s knife resting in the background, a ting on the rim, a tang in the air. The italicized sound effects create a synesthesia that is the poem’s signature: we hear the plate before we taste the berry. The imperative “Slice me. / Dice me. / On life’s cutting board” is a startling reversal—the speaker offers himself as the ingredient, not the chef, surrendering to the Muse’s knife with the same willingness a berry submits to the blade. The image of someone with “the exact wrist-twist, / the perfect pressure” brings the poem’s culinary metaphor into the realm of intimacy: this is a description of skilled hands that could apply equally to cooking and to touching. The shift from “I think / I should taste / Her” to “A beautiful / dish she is” collapses the beloved and the berry into a single object of desire—the Muse as something to be savored. The smiling knife is the poem’s most unsettling and delightful image: a blade that takes pleasure in its work, suggesting that the cutting open of the self is not violence but artistry. The closing descent from “Razzle and Dazzle / of everyone’s Dream” to “plain, / perfect” to “Simplicity” to “I love you” enacts the poem’s core argument: all the razzle-dazzle resolves into something achingly simple. The berry is the Muse, the Muse is the berry, and love—for all its complications—is just not that complicated.

A poem that succeeds through the charm and conviction of its invented conceit. The RazzleDazzleBerry is a triumph of naming—a fruit that doesn’t exist but that the reader can somehow taste, thanks to the poem’s sensory specificity: the white plate, the knife’s ting, the air’s tang, the mouthwatering craving. The food-as-love metaphor is well-trodden territory, but Plahm refreshes it by inventing the food itself, giving the poem a proprietary image that belongs to no one else’s catalog. The opening stanza’s photographic precision—berry on white, knife in background—creates a visual composition that anchors the poem’s more playful and sensuous passages. The “Slice me. / Dice me” reversal is the poem’s boldest move, placing the speaker on the cutting board rather than behind it, a gesture of surrender that deepens the culinary metaphor into something more emotionally exposed. The smiling knife is inspired—sinister and playful simultaneously, suggesting that being opened up by love is both dangerous and welcomed. The structural arc from spectacle to simplicity is the poem’s greatest achievement: it begins with razzle-dazzle and ends with “I love you,” proving that complexity resolves into plainness when the feeling is real. The word “Solitaire” in the title does quiet double duty—a single berry alone on a plate, and the card game played in solitude, connecting to the poet’s characteristic loneliness. Where the poem occasionally drifts is in its middle stanzas, which circle the conceit (tasting, craving, desiring) without always deepening it, and the “Hmm” and “Mouthwatering” asides, while charming, read as commentary rather than poetry. But the closing five lines are perfectly calibrated: “Simplicity— / One of the elixirs / Of my life. / It’s just not that— / complicated.” The em-dash before “complicated” creates a pause that is itself the poem’s argument: take a breath, let it be simple. A poem that proves the best flavors need the fewest ingredients.