Reuben Gelley Newman
Preorder
Winner of the 2025 Louise Bogan Award, Reuben Gelley Newman’s Dear Dear renders queer love through the lens of music, art, nature, and politics. Drawing on artists from Bach to Mitski, Gelley Newman flirts with nostalgia but refuses to dwell in the past, asking how remembering our ancestors can reinvigorate our present struggles. In these poems, sound becomes the language of desire and self-expression: “I want to do better / I want to be the husband of the song.” Combining playful sonnets and earnest narratives, Dear Dear searches for belonging in our grief-stricken world.
ISBN: 9781949487664
Cover Design: Joel W. Coggins
My chapbook, out from Seven Kitchens Press, pays homage to the musician Arthur Russell.
Cover art: Mieke Gelley (my grandmother!)
Untitled, Acrylic on paper, 40" by 32", 2020.
Praise:
"These beautiful and moving poems are about love. Love for queer art. Love for Arthur Russell’s kaleidoscopic music. Love for language—Reuben Gelley Newman’s poems are archival and elegiac and resonant. I learned new things about Russell’s life and work but this looking back also enlarges the present."
—Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine
"Feedback Harmonies is a vivid, beautiful array of poems that will whisk you away. It is sublime and emotional: "I wasn't prepared to be stung." It craters itself deep inside you."
—john compton, author of The Castration of a Minor God
Here is a collection that washes the reader in lyric and music, "a world // in which / to fall." At once erotic, sad, hopeful, and unerringly true. A brilliant debut.
—Jimin Seo, author of OSSIA