70 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY8, 2021
BOOKS
THAT’S THE JOKE
Big laughs and hard silences in Erin Belieu’s poetry.BY DAN CHIASSON
ILLUSTRATION BY JOE ANDERSON
T
he title of Erin Belieu’s new book
of poems, “Come-Hither Honey-
comb” (Copper Canyon), is a compact
gadget of a phrase that embodies her
tinkerer’s style of found puns, verbal
doodles, and word games. “Come-
hither” is both invitation and command,
an adjective that evolved from, but clings
to, the imperative. It modifies the word
it mirrors, “honeycomb,” which is both
the sweet core of a hive and, it turns
out, a tropical fish with a sparkly exte-
rior. And yet those showy scales are a
camouflage, a defense against preda-
tors. Though its body may narrow to
an exaggerated pucker, it wasn’t put on
the planet to kiss.
Belieu—who grew up in Nebraska,
lived for years in Florida, and now
teaches at the University of Houston—
often explores the relationship between
arousal and survival. In “Loser Bait,”
we find her title in context. “Some of
us/are chum”—used for bait, or friend-
zoned—while othersare the come-hither
honeycombgleamy in the middle
of the trap’s busted smile.The shiny victim lies in the middle of a
punched face. Belieu toggles troublingly
between screwball comedy and this sortof violence—part Howard Hawks, part
Ovid. When a “hapless nymph” enters
the scene in this poem, she dreams of a
“layabout youth” but fears a “rapey god”
who “leaps unerring, stag-like,/quicker
than smoke, to the wrong idea.”
The foundation of Belieu’s language,
and also its primary defense, is para-
dox—the symbiosis of apparent oppo-
sites. The poems create insinuations in
order to undermine them: the “wrong
idea” might, a beat later, be the “right”
one. The trapped speaker wonders if
she didn’t set her own trap:For didn’t I supply
the tippy box, too?
Notch the stick on which
to prop it?That tippy box is, perhaps, a poem, the
stick a pen. For a woman who makes
her living as a poet, these instruments
can also form a makeshift household,
reliable where others are not. Of a needy
ex who seems to have got the better of
a divorce, Belieu writes:
It must be swell,
to have both the deed and
the entitlement, for leaners who hold our
lien,consumers who consume like
red tide ripping through a coastal lake.The modern-day Narcissus “finds him-
self so very well,” when he gazes not
into a spring—or well—but into the
shallows of a kiddie pool. He should
be watching the child who belongs in
it, but he’s enthralled by his own reflec-
tion, undone by his own thirst trap.
Belieu’s poems often present uneasy
pas de deux between rivals, as though
strained coöperation were the prereq-
uisite for beauty. She refuses her ther-
apist’s “custom-order hindsight,” and
decides instead “to make like Ginger
Rogers/forever waltzing backward
down the stairs,/partnered with a man
who never liked her.” That’s a brilliant
metaphor for the retrospective method
of psychotherapy, guided not by “faith”
but by an empirical “process/of elimi-
nation.” The Fred Astaire-like “part-
ner” is an ex, but also, by transference,
the shrink. In “Pity the Doctor, Not
the Disease,” a weary clinician and a
committed drinker have arrived, after
years together, at a kind of truce about
For every one of Belieu’s wisecracks, there’s something tragic to balance the scale. the costs to the patient’s health: