Gay Heaven Is A Dance Floor but I Can't Relax

by charles theonia

The breakout poetry collection in a multiform, poetic conversation between queer and trans artists and writers.

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. Conversational, inquisitive, and scrutinizing, this book goes out to anyone who has loved someone they’ll never get to meet.

" Gay Heaven Is a Dance Floor but I Can't Relax gives me the same kind of excitement and imaginative heat that obsessing over the glossy photo middles of queer biographies does. These poems collectively form a watery slide between past and present, care and anxiety, form and formlessness, verb and noun. We can live large in the slippage between the relational and the overwhelmingly mysterious. It would be so easy to fall into a nostalgic hole, but charles isn't that kind of poet. Rather, we dance (or write) into the polymorphous dawn, "the extended cut, a technology for sensing forever." I'm grateful to have these poems for how they welcome us in through surreal syntax that then somehow forms a new grammar where metabolic harmony with cats and capybaras, zinnias and rambutans, is the norm, is the gay heaven."

- Stacy Szymaszek

"The poems in Gay Heaven Is a Dance Floor but I Can’t Relax possess astonishing depths of love in their arrangements of words and sounds, in their amusement with and within exuberant complexities, and in their utter resistance to giving in to harm and harm’s byways. The long title poem, on and for and with Arthur Russell, is a cascade of forms and voices channeled through dance and the untouch into the continuousness of collective knowledge, movement and grief in the face of devastation. And then like Martin Wong, among many other sources of art and hope, charles theonia digs the way firemen smell, listens for sounds waiting for an open mouth, and knows 'Begin can be replaced with any word that brings you closer.' This book is a companion for life."

- Anselm Berrigan

“Lucky for us we dream in landscapes / beyond our experience,” writes charles theonia in the long poem opening their electric debut collection, and readers are all the luckier for it. Brimming with a sense of the possible, among its many offerings are 'other arrangements of the self;' the dance of bodies (textual and not) entangled in sound; portals to multiple elsewheres—' a compulsion to keep remaking this world.' This world can’t become on its own, hence its gregarious erotics. Jump in!”

- Mónica de la Torre

"charles theonia's poems are everything!"

- Tourmaline

"Nothing is not gay, and neither space nor time can prevent people from touching in charles theonia’s new collection of poems, Gay Heaven Is a Dance Floor But I Can’t Relax , in which language is motioned to meet desire, to rouse it, spark it, make it public and then make it echo—because why shouldn’t it? theonia’s poems are for creatures of feeling who want both/and. They arouse, resound and satisfy."

- Shiv Kotecha

Genres: Poetry, Queer, LGBT, Transgender

112 pages, Paperback

Published April 9, 2024

About the author

charles theonia is a poet from Brooklyn. They're the author of Gay Heaven Is a Dance Floor but I Can't Relax and other writings on zits, piss, and disco.

Reviews

[Blaise Kyrios · Rating 5 out of 5]

So fun to read. Some of it was very funny, some very sad, and some felt like poetic word mad libs. Love it!

[Stella B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I suspect she's more interested in being so unlike other girls that she had to swallow a hot gay ghost and try to stomach him" mood

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

Imagine if the body were an exclamation point. And then think about what an exclamation point means for a sentence. Does the sentence achieve its exclamatory nature, because of its punctuation? Or is there a sentence essence, a linguistic tone that brims over, signaling to its writer, “EXCLAMATION!” Or perhaps more abstractly: “!!!” This is the relationship between body and world, or body and culture, which charles theonia records and considers and occupies in these poems. The role of being who they are, with the feelings they are, and the nature of a poet being anywhere, and feeling anywhere like a river current, or ocean waves, or abstract momentum arising from body. Or, conversely, what it feels like to see a plastic toy floating in a river. Which is the more accurate description of a body’s internal movement in the 21st Century? Which, the natural movement or the sight of an object being moved by that natural movement, warrants a certain punctuation mark (”!!,” just to make sure I’m clear).

What do you with a body like that? It makes me think of the space between Tommy Pico’s IRL and Junk, where his first book is like asters, how they populate a bush multiple multiple times. Which is what his recurring desires can feel like when I’m reading that book. And then his third book addresses the body that is absolutely desireful. And plentiful. And a plentiful body can be sloppy, or feel sloppy, and also have satisfactions and desires that go with it. The spaces between that is what I hear in theonia’s book. The poems might own ugliness, and might fall in love with someone in a waiting room, or at a disco, or in a book. And love, in those situations, might feel like eating lunch over your laptop, but it’s not that gross, because you’re watching a YouTube about your favorite artist. It’s like living through end times, because you’re in New York, and at least you’re in New York, so the end times might be chaotic, but they’re civilized. Like the show, Broad City, that was Hot Girl Summer even in winter. A series of stories with two women leading what appeared to be rudderless lives, but they also knew what they were doing on any given day. Which was living! And theonia’s living has that same flavor of chaos to it.

Though it’s important to note the history that sifts through the chaos. Especially the history of the AIDS Epidemic. It reminds me of The Nancy Reagan Collection, for how it draws the context of political cruelty wider. The current President is horrible. And Ronald Reagan was horrible. And that’s a complicated juxtaposition. And what are you supposed to do with that juxtaposition when you’re actually living in the present moment of horribleness? And you know there are still joys to life to be had?

[ツツ]

I kind of forced myself to read this, but I also found out that it's much easier for me if I whisper it(poems) to myself outside.
the prose I enjoyed:


say what you will about cats, but I don't see
any of you breaking into the bathroom
out of love for me

I really do savor the moment I open the morning
door and liquid cats spill in


their arm brains, visible
thoughts, light
they see with their skin

Hannah says we shouldn't stop
eating octopuses because of how smart
they are but how hard they try to escape


ugly, on the other hand, does its own thing
intimate, uncomfortable, funny, poised


I felt expired, but like
I was going to eat myself anyway


One thought, brightly colored, attracts others to spread its pollen
It's a feeling I know to be false, that everyone eise is outdoors in the sun


my interior connects to yours
A juice exchange, our renewable materials


every time we read someone, we touch
the papers touching them
the page is where we keep
looking, where we come from

that is to say, I keep trying to read myself into being


OPTIMIST
I think I am an optimist because I see many cats, but 9 out of 10 are plastic bags

PRIME DIRECTIVE
My prime directive is to not bother anyone. But I keep writing poetry

EROTICS OF THE ABSENT MIND
If my mind is going to be elsewhere, you better believe I'm making the most of the hole it left


book 9 (poetry) of 2025, (7 /February)
read outside with dusk natural lighting

[Sarkis Antonyan · Rating 4 out of 5]

MHMM snaps. i love poetry by a poet who clearly reads Peach Magazine

[Rhiley Jade · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars