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.
