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.