In My Husband Would, Benjamin Grossberg brings us to the 1990s gay clubs of Houston, to Macy’s Herald Square, and to a family seder with an imaginary daughter. Here, the poet’s parents dance awkwardly and alone at a wedding until he confesses, “I know nothing of love.” Here are all the awkward intimacies of sex, desire, loss, and commitment. Here, the poet imagines his own wedding to “a column of air”—to freedom, to time, to sex. In poem after poem, Grossberg creates that experience, intimate and enthralling, of laying bare a life, of getting us through it with enormous wit, sadness, grace, and complexity. This is a brilliant book, one I will return to with joy and envy.

                                             -—Kevin Prufer

 

The brilliance of Benjamin Grossberg’s new book lies in how many places it takes you: into the AIDS experience of the ’90s; into an imagined literary journey in which the poet’s mother moves through days and nights as a ghost form, writing a novel. One poem gives us the speaker encountering the development of his face as he ages, “facial features / drifting like continents / on the globe of my head”; in another, we climb with him up a rickety ladder to undertake a chimney repair because he refuses to pay someone do it for him: “I climbed higher, / seeing the top and overtop, as if / I were the sun having finally risen.” These poems, so often hilarious, are dizzyingly accomplished and deeply moving. My Husband Would is hands-down one of the best books of poems I’ve read in years.

                                                 —Cate Marvin