Winner of a 2009 Lambda Literary Award.
Winner of the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry.
"'I want to write a body,' Benjamin Grossberg declares in this brave, unabashed, at time theological, and utterly exuberant collection of poems. This book is a beautiful orchard, and there is a sweet wild energy at its core."
–Edward Hirsch
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"Benjamin Grossberg’s Sweet Core Orchard teems with life. The animal and vegetal world animates and dominates these poems of self-discovery and yearning. Pigs and dogs, deer and horses, beetles, lightning bugs and fruit flies cry out as he composes his human song. Above all these are poems of refuge: from familial cruelty and its mythic history, the specter of AIDS and the terror of loneliness and desire, which moves him from a cramped apartment in the city to a farm where he’s surrounded by apples and angels, a Bible in one hand, a seed catalogue in the other, looking out the window to his newly planted orchard while at his back God leans over the house “on a casual tour/ of the wreck of the world.”
–Dorianne Laux
Poet Benjamin S. Grossberg planted his own small orchard a few years ago near his home in Ohio and called it "Sweet Core Orchard," a resonant name that became the title of his second book of poetry and the latest winner of the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry. Tampa Review judges praised the book for its "compelling affirmation of the longer poem . . . brilliant lyrical and thematic arcs, rich use of archetype and symbol, and heartening honesty." Poet and critic Edward Hirsch, a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, describes it as "a brave, unabashed, at times theological, and utterly exuberant collection of poems. This book is a beautiful orchard, and there is a sweet wild energy at its core."
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