Theory of Devolution

by David Groff

With blazing wit and a searing language, David Groff writes fiercely of erosion and endurance in this stunning debut collection. At turns fervent and elegiac, dishy and sly, these poems confront the effect of AIDS and HIV on a brotherhood that dealt firsthand with grief and loss and, later, the tenuous prospect of survival. Peopled with the spirits of dead gay men, uncertain lovers, mortal parents, and spectral friends and brothers, Groff's poems are unified by their preoccupation with what erodes us and what we can hold onto when life and love devolve.
 
Theory of Devolution is a book of alternately passionate and restrained, headlong and meditative, engaged and knowingly detached. David Groff's territory is Chelsea and Fire Island, at the end of a nightmare crisis but nowhere near the end of an epidemic. How, in such times, to speak? These pages give voice to an ‘always-dying particular man,' examining the evidence of loss and pleasure and the deep bonds of affection in poems alive with ‘an odd crabbed pulse of beauty they refine to true detail.'" –- Mark Doty
 
"David Groff's poems open our attention by a subtle, unflinching love of human being. The live, known past spins sharp and fine in and out of the now of his vision. His language exhilarates." –- Marie Ponsot
 

Genres: Poetry

104 pages, Paperback

First published August 26, 2002

About the author

David Groff is an American poet, writer, and independent editor.

Groff graduated from the University of Iowa, with an MFA, and MA. He has taught at University of Iowa, Rutgers University, and NYU, and at William Paterson University.

For the last eleven years, he has worked with literary and popular novelists, memoirists, journalists, and scientists whose books have been published by Atria, Bantam, HarperCollins, Hyperion, Little Brown, Miramax, Putnam, St. Martin's, Wiley, and other publishers. For twelve years he was an editor at Crown Publishing.

Groff's work was published in American Poetry Review, Bloom, Chicago Review, Christopher Street, Confrontation, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, Men on Men 2, Men on Men 2000, Missouri Review, New York, North American Review, Northwest Review, Out, Poetry, Poetry Daily, Poetry Northwest, Poz, Prairie Schooner, QW, Self, 7 Days, 7 Carmine, and Wigwag.

Groff was awarded the Louise Bogan Award by the Lambda Literary Foundation in 2012 for his work, Clay.

He is currently an editor under the agency of Rob Weisbach Creative Management.

Reviews

[Inverted · Rating 3 out of 5]

Broke my poetry fast. I think these lines (from “Personal Land”) summarize the collection pretty well:

But in my fear and my anger
remember the members of my father’s congregation
at midnight services when they kneel for the newborn baby:
The acolyte flicks off the lights, and they sing.