My Husband Would: Poems

by Benjamin S. Grossberg

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."

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Hardcover

First published November 16, 2020

About the author

Benjamin S. Grossberg's latest collection of poetry, My Husband Would (University of Tampa Press, 2020), won the 2021 Connecticut Book Award in poetry and was a Foreword INDIES Book of the Year. His other collections include Space Traveler (University of Tampa Press, 2014) and Sweet Core Orchard (University of Tampa Press, 2009), winner of the 2008 Tampa Review Prize and the 2009 Lambda Literary Award for poetry. He is also the author of a novel, The Spring Before Obergefell (University of Nebraska Press, 2024), which won the AWP Award Series James Alan McPherson Prize and the 2025 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Romance. His poems have appeared widely, including in The Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. He also co-edited the anthology, The Poetry of Capital (University of Wisconsin Press, 2021), which curates poems that address the economic challenges of our moment. Ben is Director of Creative Writing at the University of Hartford.

Reviews

[Ron Mohring · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've long admired Ben Grossberg's discipline: he planted an orchard, FFS, and when he relocated to a new home, he planted another. Similarly, his long application of craft: the patience, the hard work, result in a body of work that rewards the reader in ways I can't begin to describe. There's wit here, and surprise, and form--a damned fine handful of some of the best sonnets I've read this year are sprinkled through the book, sonnets so finely made that their form is unnoticeable at first reading. There's love, and longing ("I Marry" just blows me away). There's sex, and risk--some poems take us back to Houston in the 1990s at the height of the AIDS pandemic (territory I remember well)--and stubbornness. Discipline requires sacrifice: can we have both love and art? The body in its strengths and weaknesses. History. Myth. A gentle, persistent queering of it all runs throughout Ben's work. I always look forward to his poems. They deserve a much wider audience.

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

In intensely expressive musings, Grossberg tackles uncomfortable subjects: longing, familial discord, regret, loss, lust. Maybe love? And though I am not an avid reader of poetry, I found his lines captivating in their conjurings. "Whose Eyes Dart Contagious Fire" raises a provocative challenge, while "Days of 1993, '94, and '95" hits you in a sore spot.