Live in Suspense - by David Groff (Paperback)

About the Book

The sharp, intelligent third collection from Groff (Clay) riffs on sex, death, and loss. The moving title poem addresses fear and the fragility of love, but the bulk of the book is a bitter assessment of the speaker's father, a man of God who dies mourning his former parish and his Cape Cod house, a moldy mess despised by the son: "My father's spine-split books,/ the cameras' cracked accordions,/ the sheepskin of diplomas,/ the piano's rusty intestines..." ("Prodigal"). In response to a poem about familial misdoings, the father cries: "Write about someone else's family!" Mother-son poems are kinder but less captivating, though a clever ghazal eloquently rhymes "first son" with "worst son." Having survived a childhood of tight-lidded Christianity, the gay adult son in these poems passes a succession of churches during a Sunday morning road race, poignantly remarking, "God harvests the town and scatters/ us unbelievers to our Sunday funk:/ my heart rate monitor ticking my pace" ("Chaff."). Groff memorably contends with grief and reckoning in these stirring pages. (Jul

Book Synopsis

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.