Live in Suspense
poems

just published by Trio House Press

About Live in Suspense

In Live in Suspense, David Groff writes about living between beginnings and endings, about always expecting the next mortal thing to happen. That suspenseful place can be painful and grievous, but also joyous; these poems both resist those tensions and find rest in them. In the elegies of Live in Suspense, Groff contends with his late mother, whose legacy she would have her son revise and resolve; a minister-father who wrestled with his own destiny and would have his son save him; and friends and lovers lost to HIV and other tribulations, "with their catcalls and canticles." As he did in his previous books, Groff writes again of his husband Clay and living with the vagaries of the virus. In poems that ask what it means to love someone and die anyway, Live in Suspense explores our connections with the irksomely finite people we care for; how we might shoulder past our guilt and grief to sidle into significance; how we might be generative if not procreative; how we might reweave our beliefs into new garments that warm us; and how ultimately we might consent to suspense--to "step away from all signs, .../shedding lexicons" and matter simply as matter.

Praise for Live in Suspense

The sharp, intelligent third collection from Groff (Clay) riffs on sex, death, and loss.... Groff memorably contends with grief and reckoning in these stirring pages. —Publishers Weekly

The dead are raised within us precisely and paradoxically when the feelings that tether us together are held in the mind as such and not allowed to reify themselves into distortions of external reality. Within this understanding of reality, the speaker’s loss harbors an invisible dignity in which all involved are netted together, not by avoiding reality, but by deepening conscious enmeshment within its shifting psychic ground.…this collection, as a whole, teems with the interplays of life between the psyche and the world, holding complicated understandings and reimagined valuing of history, family, and the revivifying other among its essential reflections. –-Michael Collins, On the Seawall

As David Groff reminds us, the past has a kind of physics that merges the far with the near.  From the consciousness of the infant on the changing table, to the memory of friends and lovers and communities destroyed by AIDS, to the tenderness of a lover before leave-taking in the present—Groff’s poems take the things of experience and bring them into exquisite relief. “There’s light and there’s lack,” one of Groff’s speakers says, underscoring the vigilant and luminous accounting in poem after poem in Live in Suspense. —Rick Barot, author of The Galleons

Imagine a mysterious illness killed many friends in your youth. “…the armada ghosting the cove, their wakes cut short.” Imagine no one wanted to talk about it and there wasn’t any cure or real treatment. “…every fuck is a threeway with you know who.” Imagine how surviving that time would affect the rest of your life, your relationship to harm and illness and the shadow of death. “…we breathe in, in hope of exhalation.” A delicate balance between fear and celebration of life, David Groff’s Live in Suspense is a brilliant meditation on the joy of surviving and the dissonance of being suspended constantly in a place of potential harm. “Joy, pain, fear,” Groff writes, “I for one can’t tell. I was carried away in the flood, ground between two stones.” —EJ Colen, author of What Weaponry and The Green Condition

Live in Suspense is a strikingly personal statement of witness to the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. Through meditations on his mother, his partner, and his boyhood, Groff's speaker weaves a triptych that is both elegant and intimate. This is a collection that wrestles with destruction with such kindness and intelligence that I do not want to let any of it go even as Groff commands me to "let me like you be snowmelt/ let us be the disappearing." —Kyle McCord, author of Reunion of the Good Weather Suicide Cult 

How beautifully David Groff envisions our moment—a moment suspended between rage against separation (separation from earth, from our beloveds, from our essential selves) and the ache for deliverance from rage. In the works gathered as Live in Suspense, poetry is once again acutely tender, one to one, as in the best poems of Cavafy. Such tenderness is itself a deliverance, a miraculous repair. —Donald Revell, author of White Campion

Live in Suspense is the work of a master craftsperson and a lesson in how to create a cohesive yet textured collection. Here David Groff delivers us poems that are thrillingly diverse in tone and form yet tightly connected in their concerns: mortality, loss, legacy. Groff’s talent for finding the just-right metaphor is perhaps only bested by his ability to stick a poem’s landing. Live in Suspense is a remarkably smart, moving, and memorable book. Groff’s best yet. —Maggie Smith, author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful

David Groff’s Live in Suspense is a book of retrospection and asks readers to consider the interstices that is a life lived between losses. In these thoughtful, formally adroit and forthright poems, Groff reminds us that the past is not really the past, but lives on around and inside of us—in memory, in our bodies, and in the hard-won changes exacted on the living.  The breaking of patrimony, the death of a father, AIDS, the pleasures and uncertainties of queer life, faith and faithlessness—all are bound up in these wide-ranging, smart, elegiac and memorable poems. —Mark Wunderlich, author of God of Nothingness