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.

Reuben Gelley Newman is a writer, librarian, and musician based in Brooklyn, NY. He is the author of the chapbook Feedback Harmonies (Seven Kitchens Press, 2024), and his poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Fairy Tale Review, Fence, Ninth Letter, Only Poems, and Salamander. A former intern at Copper Canyon Press, he has edited for The Adroit Journal and Couplet Poetry. His reviews have appeared in Adroit, The Brooklyn Rail, and diode. He holds an MS in Library and Information Science from the University at Buffalo and a BA in English Literature from Swarthmore College.