Read an Excerpt from David Groff’s ‘Clay’

Author: Julie Levine

April 12, 2013

In celebration of National Poetry Month, Lambda Literary Review is excited to share an excerpt from poet David Groff’s new collection Clay. Selected by Michael Waters for the Louise Bogan Award from Trio House Press, the collection explores love and memory filtered through the HIV/AIDS epidemic. As Timothy Liu writes in his blurb,

Gandhi famously said: ‘Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.’ He probably knew most of us live in the neither, caught between two everlastings which sadly and likely do not include us. The face of AIDS has evolved during the past three decades from something like an instant death sentence to something manageably chronic. David Groff’s poems document what it’s like to make a life with someone thusly afflicted, as survivors, as husbands, even as he renders a portrait of what love might look like at middle age, what might consequentially endure after an initial frolic in the dunes. If you can, read this book in one sitting, as if you were to die tomorrow. Then resume your living with renewed gusto.

Groff’s previous book of poems, Theory of Devolution (University of Illinois Press), was chosen by Mark Doty for the National Poetry Series. Groff teaches at the MFA program at City College of New York, and edits the Poetry Spotlight at Lambda Literary Review with Jameson Fitzpatrick. He will also be on the faculty for the 2013 Lambda Literary Writers Retreat.

Read an excerpt of Clay here.