New Release Books by David Groff

"Winner of the 2012 Louise Bogan Award for Artistic Merit and Excellence."

With blazing wit and a searing language, David Groff writes fiercely of erosion and endurance in this stunning debut collection. At turns fervent and elegiac, dishy and sly, these poems confront the effect of AIDS and HIV on a brotherhood that dealt firsthand with grief and loss and, later, the tenuous prospect of survival. Peopled with the spirits of dead gay men, uncertain lovers, mortal parents, and spectral friends and brothers, Groff''s poems are unified by their preoccupation with what erodes us and what we can hold onto when life and love devolve. Theory of Devolution is a book of balances: alternately passionate and restrained, headlong and meditative, engaged and knowingly detached. David Groff''s territory is Chelsea and Fire Island, at the end of a nightmare crisis but nowhere near the end of an epidemic. How, in such times, to speak? These pages give voice to an ''always-dying particular man,'' examining the evidence of loss and pleasure and the deep bonds of affection in poems alive with ''an odd crabbed pulse of beauty they refine to true detail.''" -- Mark Doty "David Groff''s poems open our attention by a subtle, unflinching love of human being. The live, known past spins sharp and fine in and out of the now of his vision. His language exhilarates." -- Marie Ponsot

The late author and AIDS activist combines social commentary with personal narratives to argue that gay men must transcend the culture of death and hopelessness that surrounds the AIDS epidemic. Reprint.

Included in this comprehensive book: preparing walls; hanging over existing wallpaper; removing wallpaper; using adhesives; applying borders; sealing seams; solving problems; and more.

Kenneth O''Donnell was JFK''s chief-of-staff and the co-author of Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye. In this intimate, revealing memoir of his long friendship with Bobby Kennedy, his daughter, Helen, honors his wish that RFK be remembered as the man Ken O''Donnell knew him to be. Kenny and Bobby met at Harvard in 1947, where they were both members of the football and debate teams. It was the beginning of a relationship that would end only with Bobby''s death. The two friends spent years at the epicenter of American politics, sharing highs and lows: JFK''s ascent to the presidency; Bobby''s stormy tenure as chairman of several congressional committees exploring controversial issues and later as Attorney General, locking horns with J. Edgar Hoover and Jimmy Hoffa; and JFK''s assassination. Much of the material in this poignant, illuminating memoir has never before been told. The Kennedys granted Helen O''Donnell complete access to the family archives, and encouraged many people who have never before spoken out to cooperate with her. The result is A Common Good, an intimate look at a unique relationship. Ken O''Donnell was there when Camelot began -- and when it ended in violence. In honoring her father''s request, Helen O''Donnell has shared with us her profound insights into the emotional relationship of two men at the center of American history in the twentieth century.