My Husband Would: Poems
Set at the crossroads of middle age, Benjamin S. Grossberg's fourth full-length collection of poems, My Husband Would, investigates love and family-both the families we are born into and those we create for ourselves. Funny, cinematic, and inventive, his poems recount family lore-a mother's options, the clouded circumstances of a distant marriage-side by side with the perplexities of contemporary romance. And they are charged with the recent national legalization of same-sex marriage-for many, a radical dawning of possibility, even as it quickly becomes uncontroversial, even unremarkable, in large parts of the country. These poems show us that marriage and family are a learned project, one passed down, to be attempted by each new generation as best it can with the realities at hand. Grossberg surveys the strangeness of what our parents and families teach us about intimacy and what we ourselves learn as we stumble through the landscape of contemporary dating. He finally casts his gaze to future possibility: what we would be, would do, if we could. As Grossberg notes, amid the bustle of our lives, the relationships that help us understand who we are, those losses and discoveries, begin with the simplest impulses, like "the courage/ to go up and say hello."
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Surely each of us feels like an alien from time to time, fallen into a world that can't possibly be our own. And who hasn't looked from time to time at a lover and thought, "We might as well be from different planets"? In this slyly ironic, unexpectedly moving sequence of poems, Benjamin Grossberg takes these metaphors as grounds for aching, comic meditation on what it is to be self and other in this space "we/cross and cross in unmarried vastness." Space Traveler is an engaging, memorable delight. MARK DOTY
This book clearly establishes Benjamin Grossberg as one of our most original and consistently interesting poets. The poems in Space Traveler are mature, accomplished, and--forgive me--simply out of this world! MAGGIE ANDERSON
Reading [Space Traveler] is rather like sitting on the couch with an interesting, articulate friend, listening to his stories and musings on life--that is, if he were also a smart, funny, gay space alien who had landed in your backyard. KALI LIGHTFOOT, Broadsided
The conflation of vastness and restrained language creates an emotional appeal that will gnaw at the reader for days. CHELSEA KERWIN, Mid-American Review
Space Traveler is a knockout for Grossberg, who has busted out of his shell into a mature, outgoing poet-thinker. ANDREA SYZDEK, Moon City Review
