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"Surely each of us feels like an alien from time to time, fallen into a world that can't possibly be our own. And who hasn't looked from time to time at a lover and thought, "We might as well be from different planets"? In this slyly ironic, unexpectedly moving sequence of poems, Benjamin Grossberg takes these metaphors as grounds for aching, comic meditation on what it is to be self and other in this space "we/cross and cross in unmarried vastness." Space Traveler is an engaging, memorable delight."
—Mark Doty
"This book clearly establishes Benjamin Grossberg as one of our most original and consistently interesting poets. The poems in Space Traveler are mature, accomplished, and—forgive me—simply out of this world!"
—Maggie Anderson
"Reading [Space Traveler] is rather like sitting on the couch with an interesting, articulate friend, listening to his stories and musings on life--that is, if he were also a smart, funny, gay space alien who had landed in your backyard."
—Kali Lightfoot, Broadsided
"The conflation of vastness and restrained language creates an emotional appeal that will gnaw at the reader for days.
—Chelsea Kerwin, Mid-American Review
"Space Traveler is a knockout for Grossberg, who has busted out of his shell into a mature, outgoing poet-thinker."
—Andrea Syzdek, Moon City Review
In Ben Grossberg's third collection, he forges a new mythology, fresh and contemporary in voice and content, as he examines how we live today, seen through the eyes of another being. Playful, insightful, wide in their arc of associations, the poems of Space Traveler are spoken by an alien traveling from star to star, getting a chance to observe up close the variety of outer-space phenomena. Along the way, the space traveler launches into contemplation of the range of subjects that humans encounter desire, aging, love and separation, and often addressing us, humanity, directly. The space traveler is sometimes exultant, sometimes bereft, but always finds implicit parallels of language and image between his experience traveling alone through space, and our lives in a contemporary world and a contemporary America. But despite its contemporary observations, the space traveler is the natural heir to ancient Odysseus and his fellow seafarers. He, too, navigates a magical landscape in a long search for home.