When You Read a Novel the Dead Would Like

Coming October 6th, 2026 - Books will ship the final week of September
Preorder now!

How does mortality shape our understanding of life? The poems of Grossberg’s When We Read a Novel the Dead Would Like span the trauma of coming out as a gay man at the height of the US AIDS epidemic to the advent of PrEP—a class of HIV-prevention drugs—twenty-five years later. Grossberg wrestles with the growing awareness that, though one bugbear may press less close, death still waits, patient and inevitable. A series of elegies for the poet’s mother, who returns as a wry, irreverent ghost “swirling / ice cubes in a tumbler of vodka,” lies at the heart of this ranging, cinematic collection.

Benjamin S. Grossberg’s collections of poetry include My Husband Would (University of Tampa Press, 2020), winner of the Connecticut Book Award, and Sweet Core Orchard (University of Tampa Press, 2009), winner of a Lambda Literary Award. His novel, The Spring before Obergefell (University of Nebraska Press, 2024), selected by Percival Everett for the AWP’s James Alan McPherson Prize, also received a Lambda Literary Award. His poems have appeared widely, including in The Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. Ben is Director of Creative Writing at the University of Hartford.

from My Mother Approves

Now in death,
she understands the necklace
was always about drawing the eye
to the flesh: a way to scoop
light from the air, to make
a man want to catch that light
like a snowflake on his tongue.
Yes. That’s the word
she’s saying to the body
most like her own once was,
briefly incarnating herself
in front of me to straighten
the chain. My mother like
any mother willing her child
to be beautiful: Yes, it fits
like that, close to your throat.

*****

from Coming Out

On the fire escape, someone gently strumming a guitar.
And a woman whispering. If I sit up,
I’ll see the glow of their cigarettes in the dark.

I am 18, lying on a friend’s couch
on cushions that raise a ghost of dust when you lie back.
Fingers laced behind my head, eyes open.

A construction crane waits, hook suspended,
to swing wildly forward and scoop me from my life.
That’s how I live, how I’ve lived for years.

In his latest volume, fiction and poetry Lambda Literary Award winner Benjamin Grossberg blends whip-smart storytelling and an alert, “Alex in Wonderland” attention to revealing everyday and natural details. Proving himself a resourceful literary athlete with a marathon runner’s all-systems-go air of dedication, Grossberg tackles demanding subjects such as queer loneliness, the AIDS pandemic, Jewish legacy, and a mother’s death with unfailing frankness and apt humor. Rooted in free-flowing compassion, relatable suffering, and resilient love, When You Read a Novel the Dead Would Like is a dynamic, compelling, and deeply alive book of poems.

—Cyrus Cassells, 2021 Texas Poet Laureate and author of Lorca to the Umpteenth Power

Both haunted and haunting, Benjamin Grossberg’s new book conjures the ghosts of middle-age. These are poems of memory and mortality—a man looking back at boyhood sexuality, the specter of AIDS, a mother’s dying. With a poet’s ear for subtle music and a storyteller’s instinct for heartrending detail, Grossberg explores the essence of loss and love. This is a powerful new volume from one of our essential poets.

—Bruce Snider, author of Blood Harmony

Intimate and intense, passionate and precise, and ultimately expansive and subtly exuberant, When You Read a Novel the Dead Would Like chronicles the coming into the queer body, into “desire’s sotto voce, a whisper carried on in public rooms.” And so it also confronts the consequent panicky sexual jeopardy around HIV, until that fear manifests in the loss of the poet’s mother: “why would she look so closely after me / in death, when, in life, she never had? / When all she’d done—and in a selfish way, / / a mostly selfish way—was love me?” Benjamin Grossberg’s poems emerge from the tunnel of anxiety and absence into confidence in the body and a sense of safety in the risk of close connection. Witty, incisive, eloquent, and subversively casual at times, this collection leads us into a hard-earned celebration of the mortal self, “eager to know what happens next.”

—David Groff, author of Live in Suspense

October 2026
96 pp
Trade paper – 6 X 9"
$18
ISBN 978-1-960327-21-5
Baron Wormser Notable Voices Collection