PositiveOn the Seawall... through the structural vigor of these lyric wormholes we begin to see glimpses of the self; the speaker avoids therapy through the tangential and piquant movements of mind, but in so doing provides the reader with the intimate knowledge of self-realization that the speaker is chasing ... modest, logical ironies in the dramatic tenor of self-interrogation happen repeatedly throughout Come-Hither Honeycomb and embody an important aesthetic gesture of the book: how to convey the difficult task of interrogating the self ... Wielding syntax that is piercing in its hypotactic sarcasm, throughout Come-Hither Honeycomb Belieu is able to bait the reader, as much as the speaker’s self and subjects of examination, through these lyric \'spat[s]\' ... operating under this sensibility one can run the risk of becoming too witty ... I think Belieu mainly avoids this through a measured interspersing of poems that take on a more musical and syntactic experimentation...and poems that operate under different personae, most prominently those which experiment with gender ... Although these poems offer brief intermission, they represent, perhaps to one’s excitement or one’s cerebral consternations, deviations that sometimes require space for their own sensibility to unfold, thus necessitating their own patience. But it is a patience, even as an element of craft, that the speaker in turn grants themself ... Come-Hither Honeycomb is relentless in its aesthetic exploration of these questions, but it also dispenses breadcrumbs of optimism ... a book that, through patience, rewards through its complexity of craft.
