Richard Jeffrey Newman's collection of poems, Words for What Those Men Have Done, continues the exploration he began in The Silence of Men of how surviving childhood sexual violence has shaped his life as a man. Where The Silence of Men focused on ending the silence in which the men who violated him tried to force him to live, Words for What Those Men Have Done is animated by this question: What has it meant for him to commit himself as a man never to standing on the same side of gender and sexual politics as those men?
I didn't think of Dante / when I read your letter, / but now it seems to me / I'm sitting in the only circle / of a very small hell, / and if there is a god / who condemned me to this, / he also must be very small.
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.
Richard Hoffman, author of Half The House and Noon until Night.
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.
Luis H. Francia, author of Tattered Boat