Most Popular Books by David Groff

With blazing wit and a searing language, David Groff writes fiercely of erosion and endurance in this stunning debut collection. At turns fervent and elegiac, dishy and sly, these poems confront the effect of AIDS and HIV on a brotherhood that dealt firsthand with grief and loss and, later, the tenuous prospect of survival. Peopled with the spirits of dead gay men, uncertain lovers, mortal parents, and spectral friends and brothers, Groff''s poems are unified by their preoccupation with what erodes us and what we can hold onto when life and love devolve. Theory of Devolution is a book of balances: alternately passionate and restrained, headlong and meditative, engaged and knowingly detached. David Groff''s territory is Chelsea and Fire Island, at the end of a nightmare crisis but nowhere near the end of an epidemic. How, in such times, to speak? These pages give voice to an ''always-dying particular man,'' examining the evidence of loss and pleasure and the deep bonds of affection in poems alive with ''an odd crabbed pulse of beauty they refine to true detail.''" -- Mark Doty "David Groff''s poems open our attention by a subtle, unflinching love of human being. The live, known past spins sharp and fine in and out of the now of his vision. His language exhilarates." -- Marie Ponsot

In Live in Suspense, David Groff writes about living between beginnings and endings, about always expecting the next mortal thing to happen. That suspenseful place can be painful and grievous, but also joyous; these poems both resist those tensions and find rest in them. In the elegies of Live in Suspense, Groff contends with his late mother, whose legacy she would have her son revise and resolve; a minister-father who wrestled with his own destiny and would have his son save him; and friends and lovers lost to HIV and other tribulations, "with their catcalls and canticles." As he did in his previous books, Groff writes again of his husband Clay and living with the vagaries of the virus. In poems that ask what it means to love someone and die anyway, Live in Suspense explores our connections with the irksomely finite people we care for; how we might shoulder past our guilt and grief to sidle into significance; how we might be generative if not procreative; how we might reweave our beliefs into new garments that warm us; and how ultimately we might consent to suspense--to "step away from all signs, .../shedding lexicons" and matter simply as matter.

"Winner of the 2012 Louise Bogan Award for Artistic Merit and Excellence."

The late author and AIDS activist combines social commentary with personal narratives to argue that gay men must transcend the culture of death and hopelessness that surrounds the AIDS epidemic. Reprint.