New Releases by David Groff

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."

After years in a committed relationship, Jon and Michael Galluccio became foster parents to Adam, an infant born with the HIV virus. Refused by the state of New Jersey to adopt him, the Galluccios filed a class action lawsuit and won. This heartwarming story shows that the American family is vibrantly alive and extending itself in new directions. photo insert.

With blazing wit and a searing language, David Groff writes fiercely of erosion and endurance in this stunning debut collection. Theory of Devolution resonates with the persistence of ruination, affectation, and the mysteries of the borders and shorelines we so uneasily inhabit.

Robin Hardy writes of the gay man's struggle to maintain power over his health, his body, and his sexuality in the face of a devastating epidemic. Building on the work of books like Paul Monette's Borrowed Time and Randy Shilts's And the Band Played On, The Crisis of Desire combines memoir and social critique in a forward-looking appeal to gay men to accept "the mortal risk of loving." Historically, AIDS forced gay men into a defensive position that devastated their community and their sense of themselves. Today, whether they are fighting for health care or exploring their sexuality, gay men are constrained by society and the government--and also by their own estrangement from the pre-AIDS era of sexual possibility. Because HIV is more manageable for many, the issues of sexual health, responsibility, and sexual empowerment are more vital than ever. A fresh and persuasive call in an urgent debate, The Crisis of Desire is a return to the Stonewall legacy, a bold commitment to connections based on truth, human care, and the sexual authenticity of the individual.