You can do it alone in bed by lamplight, or perhaps on the bus, with headphones. You might prefer to do it, like I do, sitting uncomfortably at a desk, though I suppose it’s perfectly fine to do it standing up, at least for short stretches. I like to do it analog, with all the tactility that implies, though we're all mostly doing it on screens now, anyway. After a particularly good time doing it, I feel transformed, like a new person—perhaps another person—and that’s why I do it constantly, perhaps compulsively. It’s “surfaces touching / up to each other, to offer / relations aftertouch.” That is how charles theonia so accurately describes the act in their most recent collection of poems, Gay Heaven is a Dance Floor but I Can’t Relax, “an offer to be there in collective.”

Reading: it is transportive and transformative. In this, it’s not unlike other acts that produce euphoria, like dancing, or running, or fucking. I think of a line by another Charles, this time Bovary, who says of his wife Emma: “Even though she has been told she ought to exercise, she’d rather stay in her room all the time and read.” She likes reading the kind of short stories that you could consume quickly, that scare you a little bit, things that heighten the “moderate” experiences of everyday life. Those who readily took up being described as “bookish” at a young age can attest that reading is a means of achieving proximity to people you can’t get close to and partaking in experiences you haven’t yet had; Emma Bovary reads “Balzac and George Sand, seeking in them the imagined satisfaction of her own desires.”

In this, theonia is a kindred soul: “every time we read someone, we touch / the papers touching them,” they continue in the poem “B-Side,” a paradigmatic example of the sensuousness and vitality that makes Gay Heaven, with all of its many citations to poetry and literature and pop music so pleasurable. “the page is where we keep looking, where we come from,” and they attempt to realize the self—to “read myself into being”—through this repeated contact. Reading, they know, generates collective feeling, binding us in relation to one another and to those in the past. In this, it is like other things—see fucking, dancing to disco—but like those other things, there’s a limit to the extent to which it can entirely evacuate the self, as theonia continues:

Is it my sentimentalism, my bovarysme, that makes me love these lines so much? Or is it the fact that theonia grasps how finding affinity with a text or a film or a song that gives shape to a feeling you’ve had—that maybe anticipates that feeling itself—is one of the greatest pleasures of being alive? theonia’s openness to aesthetic experience animates the eclecticism of Gay Heaven and gives the collection its utopian ethos. A 1986 painting by Martin Wong is an excuse to meditate on sweat, smoke, and BO, the combinatory olfaction of firemen; an offhand tweet from Diana Ross occasions the ”synesthetic epiphany that the color of joy is pink.”

The long title poem is an ode to Arthur Russell, pockmarked wunderkind from Iowa who brought together disco and avant-garde composition and died of AIDS-related complications in 1992. Russell’s eclecticism inspired his understanding of the generative potential of the aesthetic—“utopia: a compulsion to keep remaking this world,” and the intellectual and aesthetic promises of utopianism at the heart of theonia’s vision of queer collective life. Though theonia hadn’t known much about Russell’s biography before sinking into the grooves of his wild combinations of disco-cello-pop, the two decades of cultural output has made this figure more tangible: Matt Wolf’s impressionistic documentary portrait in 2008, Tim Lawrence’s cultural history of Russell and downtown New York in 2009, and the archival work of Russell’s partner Tom Lee, Steve Knutson of Audika Records at the New York Public Library.

Tangible to the point of seeming alive, and not simply resuscitated through theonia’s text. “gay life: you want to dance,” writes theonia and it’s true: you want to feel it in your body. That treatment applies to all of the citations—a “study of shared life,”—from Joe Brainard to Beverly Glenn-Copeland, to Renee Gladman, that theonia makes room for in their gay heaven. All of this work ushered inside by the poet’s receptiveness to all different forms and textures that give gay heaven its shape.

I’m reminded of two maxims that Wayne Koestenbaum supplies at the end of an essay about the apostasy of fandom: “refuse compartmentalizations; if you’re agonizing over an aesthetic problem that you can’t solve, widen the frame.” And so theonia does, looking to the “cut-up and reaching for a collaborative mix”, creating a new, synthetic form out of Spicer’s esotericism and O’Hara’s joie de vivre. “AFFINITY POLITICS: My enduring affinity for art by gay men who don’t care about me.” It’s an indictment of the limitations of canon formation, sprucing up heterosexual modernism with a few cis gay men in the mix, and a challenge to the reader to see what horizons our aesthetic attachments can take us, even if those horizons weren’t envisioned by the figures we invoke and whose work we use and repurpose. theonia looks to O’Hara, Spicer, and Russell not so much for who they were as for what their interventions could make possible for us. What forms can we discover when we are guided by our desires, pleasures, affinities, loves, and what lengths do we go to pursue them? References to open mouths abound, each a wet portal and passage for experience that changes you at the molecular level, so that even as the individual self “keeps atomizing,” they know that “everything’s not enough.” theonia’s acumen for describing immediate sensation and smart approach to managing archive fever prevents them from being seduced by nostalgia, so the “ongoingness” of Russell’s disco is met with the ongoingness of the AIDS crisis—they remind us that in 2019, pharma giant Gilead set the price of Truvada at a fat $21k per year.

My own bovarysme makes me susceptible to wondering what I’d be doing if I were someone else, somewhere else, in some other time, even as I know we’re never truly far from history, that we must take up collective life on the streets, on the dance floor, in the very whorls and crevices of writing. I couldn’t help but feel touched when I read this in the concluding movement: “if I were alive then, I’d be in the library.”