When you open Reuben Gelley Newman’s debut full-length collection of poems, Dear Dear, you do not even get to the first poem to discover that music is an important part of the book. However, music is the subject, or one of the subjects, of the book only insofar as the tittle is merely an orthographic decoration. Rather, it is the book’s structural logic. Or Newman’s way of inhabiting and exhausting feelings, however numerous, gaunt, or tender about his humanistic, or musical, heroes since the governing presences in the book are the late American queer composers Arthur Russell and Julius Eastman, both of whom died in the early 1990s in their early and late 40s, respectively. In the course of Dear Dear, Newman brings to these poems a musician’s ear for repetition, channeling both composers, alongside their defining styles, with palpably enthusiastic devotion. In an early elegy for Russell titled “Jellyfish,” the poet recounts his experience of coming to Russell’s music for the first time, unprepared for the pure mastery of its new and experimental texture on the ear:

your voice

gliding through consonants
liquid and voiceless,

your cello trembling unlike
a cello, the sound’s

edges sanded, weathered
by gales and saltwater,

a jellyfish loping gelatinously
in a vortex of vibrant motion

The poet wasn’t prepared to be so moved—or “stung”—by Russell’s music, which he considered, rather glamorously and nostalgically at the end of the poem, to be ”love.” Considering them as vanguards who have influenced his way of seeing and feeling, Newman moves from the expected nostalgia with which he writes about Russell in the elegiac “Jellyfish” and the consonant, lively, allusive, and repetitive “Your Melodies” to bring the historically eclipsed ghost of Julius Eastman to life in “Euphoria”:

Break away, then establish
the riff again. Shake
the rafters, then clarinet a glyph.
Hasp a saxophone, then quake

a quiet egg into drum sizzle.
Let the violins boil
& piano stagger into drizzle:
stay on it, Julius, stay in this soil

Eastman’s “Stay On It” is indeed “the perfect poem” but for this moment of various social and cultural attenuations, when we struggle to sit with our thoughts, enervated by repetition and easily spent out of our minds by the minor anomalies of an increasingly mechanized world. Newman’s reverence for these artists is contagious because of the assertive energy with which he places their musical genius at the fore of our imagination through both wonder and fine, compressed analysis. Consider the first stanza of “The Lord Giveth and the Lord Taketh Away, Blessed Be the Name of the Lord” in which what seems to have arrested Newman’s Gen Z mind and fancy is Eastman’s own special reverence for energetic repetition in his minimalist music:

Fifteen words, Julius. Fifteen words you sing over and over again,
spanning the registers of your voice, hanging above the abyss.
Fifteen words linger tongue ring for fifteen minutes, fifteen words
prayer buzz plosive “b” of blessed plosive “d” at the end of Lord,
fifteen words, a liturgy, fifteen words from the Book of Job

Yet the power of Newman’s poetry in Dear Dear, despite its heavy concentration on these brilliant artists who died too young to enjoy the fruit of their work, is that it fascinates as poetry. Newman comes to that fascination in many ways. For example, the book moves through ekphrasis (Jasper Johns recurs across several poems with his encaustic surfaces furnishing Newman with a metaphor for layered affect), through queer lyric biography, through political elegy, and through a belated bereavement for those talented artists who never achieved in their lifetimes the recognition their work demanded and deserved. All of this is sometimes expressed with certain emotional containment, sometimes with certain jaunty exuberance.

“Fame” is a wonderful trip around Russell’s career of failed or foreclosed encounters with mainstream success, ranging from his Columbia session with John Hammond in 1975, his almost-membership with Talking Heads in 1976, to his collaboration on an opera score for Robert Wilson in 1980, all of which fell through one way or the other. This poem, long and narratively rich, is more a poem of historical information than a poem of feeling, but poems like “On the Sixth Anniversary of Pulse,” “Cello Song,” and “Summer Moon” are poems of nothing else if not first of naked, unbuffered feelings. “Summer Moon” is perhaps the most economical demonstration of this feeling, though it dons the elegant costume of formal wit. Brilliantly, the poem builds an elaborate grammar conceit—clouds as ink, the sun as period, stars appending semicolons, and so on—only to let it yowl under the weight of the speaker’s undisguised longing. The poem reads:

¹Over the earth the sky begets its grammar.
²The cloud cleaves the dusk with ink.
³The sun sets, a period through the horizon.
⁴The stars append their semicolons;
‍⁵constellations stipple my soul,
⁶and from the parenthesis of a crescent moon
⁷slips my stupid dream of love—
⁸ah! love! ah! the em dash of my soul
⁹wherefore art thou Romeooooo
¹⁰[  ] the archaic echo in my homo
¹¹sexual whole, the unhyphenated
¹²double last name, the unhydrated boy…
¹³…¹

Genuinely funny, but genuinely sad at the same time on closer inspection, “Summer Moon” compresses into fourteen lines (yes, including the paratext, as Newman notes) a feeling most of us might recognize: looking at the sky and feeling as though the universe owes us an encounter far more magnificent than our own isolated company, a longing to be fully hydrated by the overflowing passion of another.

The “unhydrated boy” of “Summer Moon” is the same figure that animates the eponymous poem, “Dear Dear.” This nine-part episodic poem, set against the isolating atmosphere of New England, is a queer bildungsroman: it is an exploration of identity, desire, domesticity, and self-mythologizing that moves fluidly between gritty realism, meta-poetic commentary, tetchy lyricism, and surreal fairy-tale logic. Electing Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red—a reimagination of Greek myth of Geryon as a young, queer boy in love with Heracles only to be rejected—as a conceptual module for his poem, Newman shows an enviable expressive tact as he composes a narrative of searing, youthful desire. The first section goes:

The dog-eared copy of Autobiography of Red
‍seemed like something archival to him,
smudged with the fingerprints of who knows how many boys
and perhaps some charcoal and semen,
so of course he lingered in the library with the Hershey’s Kisses
left over from Valentine’s Day and the vague reminisces
of the potatoes he parboiled and roasted for dinner
with a smattering of cumin and paprika,
all doused in maple syrup and some mundane
brand of Argentinian olive oil,
a few carrots thrown in for luck, roasted to the point of burning,
because burning is what every boy wants,
especially when they are alone
and it is winter.

From this picture of the speaker lingering in a library, surrounded by the sad detritus of passing time and rumination on his loneliness, germinating a desperate need in him for warmth—the poem moves from this quiet, vegetative isolation into a sequence of increasingly restless domestic and mythic trials. Newman tracks the speaker’s fitful coming-of-age through the visceral consumption of adulthood—from braising chicken thighs to eating meat “like a man”—and a numbing, frozen stasis: “Having masturbated. Having showered. Having not done the laundry / for two weeks.” This gritty stagnation soon ruptures into defensive, tetchy recollections of childhood gender play, which in turn yield to a surreal, classical dreamscape where a high school Latin trip to Vesuvius bleeds into an encounter with a fantasy dragon. In this mythic register, domestic chores devolve into a chaotic, magical-realist nightmare: “The chicken stew grows bones. / A ghost chicken rises from burnt / splatters between the stovetop spirals.” Yet, when the dragon meets the boy’s grand romantic offering with a deflating, colloquial “Meh,” these elaborate internal mythologies come crashing down, leaving the speaker exposed to the very real-world vulnerability he was trying to outrun. Through this chaotic escalation, Newman gracefully balances the speaker’s emotional exposure with an ironic, stylistic detachment: “His shoes get soaked, drunk on the early / arrival of spring. False, assuredly.” I mean, what a brilliant way to voice a beautiful, if clichéd, sentiment while maintaining his intellectual dignity by immediately disavowing it.

The poem is also satisfyingly self-aware, constantly breaking the fourth wall to interrogate the poem’s own existence, first in the fourth section and then in the ninth when the speaker steps back to look at the narrative he has spun, admitting:

If
the poem is ironic, it’s also terribly earnest. If
it’s an exercise in fancy, it’s also a play
with mundanity.

This duality runs through the poem as crystallized in that self-correcting irony. It balances the high-brow, “learned and literary” lifestyle of the library collections and classical references with the gutting loneliness of a young man freezing himself in the snow to escape his own thoughts. However, its final lines boil the whole narrative down to a repetitive, rhythmic sigh, again in both reverence and reference to Arthur Russell and Julius Eastman’s musical styles:

Dear boy, my darling.
Dear boy—oh dear.
Dear, dear, dear, dear.

It is hard to gloss over this sharp transmogrification. What is conventionally an opening in letter writing and technically a term of endearment as it is here, retains its identity as an expression of tenderness, but in a rather inseparable combination containing pity and exhaustion. I cannot help but imagine the voice in this last section as the older, wiser version of the clueless boy that opens the poem. Grown up, he looks back at that lonely, desperate, and “learned” boy in a library in Massachusetts reading Carson’s Autobiography of Red, with a mixture of love and devastation who used to be just like Geryon after Herakles breaks his heart. “Dear Dear” is a feat of self-reflective narration and it shows nothing as convincingly as Newman’s imaginative power, as well as his poetic intelligence and structural discipline.

Newman himself is the subject of Dear Dear. However, it is because we are never ourselves alone and do not become ourselves except through the generous influences and lived experiences of others, that presences like Arthur Russell and Julius Eastman, among others, are vital to the best articulation of the book and the growing self it portrays.