Archway Editions, 2024
Like meeting under a disco ball, or listening to Arthur Russell on the Staten Island Ferry, Gay Heaven Is a Dance Floor but I Can’t Relax proposes reading as a form of friendship. This book goes out to anyone who has loved someone they’ll never get to meet.
Writing on GAY HEAVEN:
"As with any reference guide, this text desires a world beyond itself, through itself... These poems remind us of the enduring labors keeping an 'us' alive."
– Rebecca Teich, BOMB Magazine
"The book’s last movement [is] a beautiful, long-form poem about Arthur Russell, the genre-hopping musician who died of AIDS-related illness in 1992. (The “about” feels inadequate—the poem is sometimes an ode, and sometimes a self-portrait as Russell, and sometimes a landscape, New York in the eighties.)"
– Josh Ascherman, The Brooklyn Rail
"theonia made... their own version of [Arthur] Russell’s work, woven through the titular poem of their new collection, Gay Heaven Is a Dance Floor but I Can’t Relax. There are bits and pieces of titles and little curlicues of text that can be read in any direction, like snippets of recording tape waiting to be spliced."
– Sasha Frere-Jones, 4Columns
“'gay life: you want to dance,' writes theonia and it’s true: you want to feel it in your body."
– Tausif Noor, The Poetry Project Newsletter
