David Groff

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

Clay

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

Poems

Theory of Devolution

Philip Clark

40 of the most admired poets who died of AIDS are remembered in a new and groundbreaking collection. From Reinaldo Arenas, Tory Dent and James Merrill to Paul Monette, Essex Hemphill and Joe Brainard, Persistent Voices memorialises these poets and many others by presenting their work - often dealing with AIDS but also other enduring topics - in the context of an unending epidemic that has profoundly affected global literature.

Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS

Persistent Voices

Jim Elledge

Who’s Yer Daddy? offers readers of gay male literature a keen and engaging journey. In this anthology, thirty-nine gay authors discuss individuals who have influenced them—their inspirational “daddies.” The essayists include fiction writers, poets, and performance artists, both honored masters of contemporary literature and those just beginning to blaze their own trails. They find their artistic ancestry among not only literary icons—Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, André Gide, Frank O’Hara, James Baldwin, Edmund White—but also a roster of figures whose creative territories are startlingly wide and vital, from Botticelli to Bette Midler to Captain Kirk. Some writers chronicle an entire tribal council of mentors; others describe a transformative encounter with a particular individual, including teachers and friends whose guidance or example cracked open their artistic selves. Perhaps most moving are the handful of writers who answered the question literally, writing intimately of their own fathers and their literary inheritance. This rich volume presents intriguing insights into the contemporary gay literary aesthetic. Winner, LGBT Nonfiction Anthology, Lambda Literary Awards

David Groff

About

Books

Join the club