Kay Gabriel at Bookforum:
MIDWAY THROUGH ABOUT ED, Robert Glück revives a line by Frank O’Hara: “Is the earth as full as life was full, of them?” Referring to three of O’Hara’s recently deceased friends, the line appears in “A Step Away from Them,” where it clangs against the rest of the poem and its meandering attention to noontime activity in midtown Manhattan, 1956. It perplexes Glück, whose About Ed remembers Ed Auerlich-Sugai, a lover and friend who died of AIDS-related complications in 1994. “The misdirection threw me,” Glück writes, “from the earth being full, to life being full, instead of Ed being full of life. Was life still full. . . ? Was it always? Was it ever?”
Glück’s somewhat lyrical question asks after “the fertility of death,” as he calls it elsewhere. That vivid phrase suggests its author’s heterodox approach to a literature of loss, grief, and HIV/AIDS. In his grief, Glück elaborates a particular and surprising structure of feeling: abundance where one might have expected absence.
more here.