Distributed for CavanKerry Press
When You Read a Novel the Dead Would Like
From distinguished poet Benjamin S. Grossberg comes a bracing exploration of how the fear of death softens into acceptance.
Benjamin S. Grossberg’s When You Read a Novel the Dead Would Like is about how we come to understand death—sometimes in terror, sometimes in loss, and perhaps, in the sober assessments of middle age, with calm acceptance, when what may have loomed as a nightmare can come to seem unremarkable, familiar, even a “private wonder.” The poems span the trauma of coming out as a gay man at the height of the US AIDS epidemic to the advent of PrEP—a class of HIV-prevention drugs—twenty-five years later. The poems wrestle with the growing awareness that, though one bugbear may press less close, death still waits, patient and inevitable. A series of elegies for the poet’s mother, who returns as a wry, irreverent ghost “swirling/ice cubes in a tumbler of vodka,” lies at the heart of this ranging, cinematic collection.
Reviews
Table of Contents
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Pollen
The Other Gay Kid in Class
Coming Out
Trespasses
I Was Carrying a Velvet Wingback Through the Streets of Houston
Neuermannzweitesdatehertshmerz
Mary’s
Cricket in the House
Ohio Mud
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My Mother’s Dying
Trying to Bathe a Kitten, My Brothers Drown It
The Poem as an Act of Betrayal
The Wedgwood, the Watches
Something Forced
“As Are Right Fit”
Irreverent Though We Were, We Sang Dayenu
Seeing Those Damn Greasy
Yahrzeit
My Mother Approves
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Honoring the Ancestors
Or Had They Let Me Choose
The Arrogances
Selections From a PrEP Diary
Day 0/ After AIDS
Day 4
Day 35/ I Want to Be That Guy
Day 75/ It Kept Always Being Sunday
Sometime Later/ For Men, the First Real Date Is in Bed
Why I Gave My Harness Bells a Shake
The Company of Men
Bury Me
Finale
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When You Read a Novel the Dead Would Like
Acknowledgments