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.