Reuben Gelley Newman | Feedback Harmonies

Feedback Harmonies: Twelve Poems for Arthur Russell by Reuben Gelley Newman. Number 30 in our Robin Becker Series, selected by series editor Steve Bellin-Oka.

[ cover by Mieke Gelley: Untitled, Acrylic on paper, 40″ by 32″ ]

“Feedback Harmonies is all desire: queer desire’s longing for what the world sees as too slant to indefinitely hold. Reanimating music through Arthur Russell’s archive-body, Reuben Gelley Newman marries musical language and queer longing’s indefinable failures, ‘your cello trembling unlike / a cello’ remains ‘your melody whirling me / as I swim through a forest of boys,’ painfully recapitulating queer exclusion from a hetero-normative pastoral. 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

“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. The speaker’s own journey underscores the vitality of queer art. How music and literature can sustain us, guide us. These poems—like Russell’s music— will offer solace and nourishment to those who feel out of sync, who know there’s something beautiful inside them.”

—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. The swirling of music, life, and Arthur Russell explodes in the superb pages of this collection. The fluid but sharp metaphors and images excite, ‘liquefying [the] raw material’ of the self.

—john compton, author of the castration of a minor god

Publication:  November 19, 2023 [100 copies]
31 pages
ISBN 978-1-960693-08-2
$ 12.00

[ photo by Zuhra Amini ]

Reuben Gelley Newman (he/him) is a writer, musician, and librarian-in-training based in New York City. A co-editor at Couplet Poetry, his poems have appeared in Fairy Tale Review, The Journal, Alien Magazine, Northwest Review, and Ninth Letter. You can find him on social media @joustingsnail.

Cello Song

I’m on a dwarf planet, in a hive of sound and gravity,
the lush architecture of a cello, strings rustling softly
against the stars, thick with sixteenth notes, sweet

honey of bees, and I’ve freed myself from the real world,
the boys I’ve loved are comets flashing by, bursting
into my memory, disappearing into orbits so far

I can barely see, but then I’m whiplashed by a cloud
of deceptive chords, strung along by a boy who never
loved me back. Take me, I want to break into shards
of varnished maple, I want to be an exploding cello, my love

too large for its chamber. I want the strings to fly off
the fingerboard, the fingerboard to break off the neck,
the neck to spin off the body, a love unheard of,
a love that hurts to be heard.

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