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.