Golden Honey explores an on-again, off-again relationship in the utterances of pop song, ballad, and elegy. Here is an author willing to experiment on the page-with what society deems acceptable behavior, with the messy territory between grieving a loss and moving on from a loved one. These poems are oceanic, have depths inexplicable and unreachable by definition. Fittingly, too, they venture into territories of addiction and substance use, of parenting and familial inheritance, of self-implication and questioning within those structures. As Varela writes, "I've been swimming / before my feet learned to walk." To swim with this poet is to explore what it is to feel, and to feel complicatedly, and to feel inside of complication- to follow our feet, even when we know they might lead us back to darkness.
