Guernica Editions

Richard Jeffrey Newman’s poems are never less than intimate, often powerfully explosive, clear-eyed portraits of a life: his and those of the different people who have affected him. Kin, spouse, son, friends, even strangers on the street make up the dramatis personae of Words For What Those Men Have Done. Among the themes here are sex, death, birth, abuse, and being Jewish. Newman sidesteps sentimentality easily to reveal the strictures—and structures—that both govern and determine his waking hours. In many poems, he explores how dreams form a deeply rooted part of his being. One man has etched these words into his, our, conscience: cause for meditation and celebration.

Richard Jeffrey Newman's poems are alert to the possibility of redemption, not by transcending injury and sorrow, but by finding meaning there, and connection to others' suffering, and the bedrock truth of desire. Plaiting lyric and narrative, these poems move through boyhood's terror, through adulthood's reckonings, through devastating dreams and all-too-real atrocities. Their beauty and power is in their clarity and determined witness. This is a poet of passionate commitment who endures desire and in whose poems desire endures.