As Are Right Fit coming soon for purchase!
Benjamin S. Grossberg
Originally from Far Rockaway, New York, Benjamin S. Grossberg was educated at Rutgers and the University of Houston. From 2000 to 2008, he worked at Antioch College in Ohio, where he purchased a small farm and planted the Granny Smith orchard for which his second book was named. He is currently Director of Creative Writing and a Professor of English at the University of Hartford, in Hartford, Connecticut.
Ben's books of poetry include My Husband Would (University of Tampa, 2020), winner of the Connecticut Book Award and a Foreword INDIES Book of the Year; Space Traveler (University of Tampa, 2014); Sweet Core Orchard (University of Tampa, 2009), winner of the Tampa Review Prize and a Lambda Literary Award; and Underwater Lengths in a Single Breath (Ashland Poetry Press, 2007), winner of the Snyder Prize. He has also published two chapbooks, An Elegy (Jacar Press, 2016) and The Auctioneer Bangs his Gavel (Kent State University Press, 2006). A new chapbook is forthcoming from Small Harbor Press late in 2024. He co-edited an anthology, The Poetry of Capital (University of Wisconsin Press, 2020), which curates poems about the economic pressures of our moment. And he wrote the novel, The Spring before Obergefell (University of Nebraska Press, 2024), selected by Percival Everett for the 2023 AWP Award Series James Alan McPherson Prize.
His poems have appeared widely, including in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies, Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, and the magazines Paris Review, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, New England Review, and The Sun.
Ben is also a runner, vegetarian, and cat steward.
Praise for As Are Right Fit:
The poems in As Are Right Fit comprise a deeply affecting twenty-first-century elegy, by turns mournful, bitter, loving, grief-stricken, and hilariously funny. Their lifeblood is Benjamin Grossberg’s infallible eye for the telling, riveting, unforgettable detail. This is the rare elegy that offers an open-eyed and many-sided, as well as extremely vivid, portrait of its subject. Here, we have a son eulogizing his dead mother without an iota of sentimentality, demonstrating an abiding love that has managed to overcome error, imperfection and disappointment.
—Jacqueline Osherow, author of Divine Ratios: Poems
and Distinguished Professor of English,
University of Utah
About As Are Right Fit
Grossberg’s As Are Right Fit takes on the complex, messy work of trying to make sense of a parent’s life on the occasion of her passing. What moments were pivotal? How did her struggles, obsessions, and ambitions play out? And what legacy she has left for those who loved her? This collection opens with the poet’s mother dying of cancer, but ranges widely: to her sixteenth birthday as she holds out her hand to admire a new charm bracelet; to decades of motherhood and work; to late middle age, swirling ice cubes in a tumbler of vodka—and finally to her as a ghost, “dragging the gray lace of itself /across hardwood floors.” With wit, invention, and rich detail, these poems remind us that grieving is also a quest for understanding, and that it involves celebrating the joy, humor, and particularity that make each of us, in the hearts of those who love us, indelible.
Cover art by: C.R. Resetarits