Objects in Mirror May Be Closer Than They Appear (Arroyo Seco Press 2025) by Gary D Grossman
By Editor Sharon Waller Knutson
Through his poignant and powerful as well as charming and delightful poems, Gary Grossman is known on Storyteller Poetry Review as a scientist turned poet who has found happiness as a devoted husband and father of two beautiful and successful daughters.
In his new poetry collection, Objects in Mirror May Be Closer Than They Appear, which moved me to tears, Gary shows a different side of himself that led me to question if the book was fictional or autobiographical.
Here’s what Gary had to say:
“Most of it is autobiographical, occasionally I add in some poetic license like having a son, instead of two daughters. I was in three foster homes at various times, only saw my father twice, had a bipolar mother who tried to commit suicide twice and I am an only child.”
Gary Grossman
His fellow poets and some of my favorite poems tell the story much better than I could.
Poet Gary Grossman has done it again! He’s written another fabulous collection of poems that left me wanting more. “Kale cultivars embrace frost, and their sage-green to rosy bodies makes them as luscious as freshly licked nipples on an arching chest,” the poet proclaims in “Covering the Beds.” Grossman’s unique style and POV are impressive, and make this book a must read.
Alexis Rhone Fancher, author of Brazen, Triggered, and The Dead Kid Poems
Gary Grossman’s poems combine a scientist’s cool detachment with a poet’s intense yearning to create a voice uniquely his own. He looks back at a traumatic childhood with clarity and compassion, and at the complexities of everyday experience with humor and wisdom. Broadly speaking, the poems focus on the wonder of life and the inevitability of death in the human and the natural worlds. More specifically, they address the poet’s awareness of his own aging and mortality, which is always closer than it appears.
Eric Nelson
In Objects in Mirror May Be Closer Than They Appear, poet Gary Grossman uses mirror and microscope to observe the closer-than-you-think past. With equal care, he analyses outer layers of pretense, disguise, and skin. Combining the personal and the scientific, he sees beyond the moment. “Even in poetry,” Grossman explains, “genius begins as atoms no one else has cleaved.” Filled with birds, gardening, and mating, Objects in Mirror addresses—in prose poems and free verse—the humorous and the heady. The poet moves easily from decaf espresso, Zoom poetry readings, and old Woody Allen jokes to his mother’s bipolar disorder, bully foster brothers, and a collapsing spinal cord. As Grossman states, “My wife says I’m less bruised than most old apples.” He suggests aging is “a matter of survival,” a claim made with rejoicing and resignation. Yet these poems, both tart and sweet, are ripe and ready for the picking. Enjoy.
Marjorie Maddox, author of Seeing Things
There is a lot to admire in Gary Grossman's work in general, and in Objects in Mirror May Be Closer Than They Appear in particular. He deals with life and the world with sensitivity and insight. He sees through artifice and lies brilliantly, and he gives us moments of great beauty. But many poets can do this. What distinguishes Grossman's work is that he has the soul of a poet, but the education and training of a scientist. He understands what great nature poets all understand, that the beauty and magic of nature is contained in the science that describes it. He unlocks the magic of nature for us. Through his work, we understand the intricacies of the natural world, but with his poet soul, he shows us the natural world with grace.
John Brantingham, former Poet Laureate of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks
Gary Grossman’s mother
Adolescence
Imagine this,
I’m fourteen, home from a weekend trip,
smiling at the lemony rays of an LA
December afternoon, then turn the key
in the worn brass plated doorknob.
Imagine this,
my nostrils are punched by fists
of shit and vomit, and I wonder how
some cat or coon entered the apartment
and died.
Imagine this,
Mom’s lying in the mess, uncapped
amber pill bottles lined up like soldiers
in a firing squad on her nightstand.
Imagine this,
it's not the first time.
Underwater
I lasted a week at the first foster home.
There I learned to only inhale, because
a completed breath brought the unknown—
days to come were milk poured into water,
cloudy and without taste, I was underwater.
The second home taught me to hold my breath—
the blue backyard plastic pool, where in June,
my bully foster brothers played octopus.
Binding arms and legs while pushing
my head under water.
Number three included parents who never
left the couch or TV—obesity, cockroaches,
and a baby boy with soiled diapers.
No AC and the thick August air
felt like breathing underwater.
Even a crazy Mom beats this, so I returned
home for a year, then at 17 moved out.
Mom left LA for Tecate, Mexico, and died
eight months later, when her car vaulted
an embankment and ended up underwater.
Self-Examination
If the recession of 2008 hadn’t maimed so many of us accountants, I wouldn’t have started shoplifting. And though I floated towards homelessness, I clawed my way back up the economic beach, even after watching that ebb tide sweep so many bellowing colleagues out to sea. I don’t mean to lack compassion, no, really, but like they say, if ya done it, it ain’t bragging. At that point I realized my salvation lay in the collection plate of petty crime. I mean, wife and kids sayonaraed me long ago, and I’ve been on my own now for one hundred seventy-eight weeks.
My initiation into larceny began with basic needs stuffed down my pants—snickers bars, white bread, tins of potted meat, and pony bottles of beer, really just things to tide me over, but then a better plan skipped across my mind like the way a crumpled styrofoam cup skates over an oily canal on a windy day.
Reaching back into my old quantitative tool-bag, I began computer-scamming—targeting the idle rich, sweeping their crypto out from under their noses, while posing as a 40ish blonde widow whose nipples peered like shy buttons from a sheer black nightgown.
Twelve years later, sometimes I ask myself do you really know the difference between want and need, even though these economic curves are the basis of civilized capitalism? Yet neither produces the orgiastic thrill accompanying a successful theft, abdominal muscles contracting involuntarily at the start and relaxing with each exhalation as the crime struts forward.
Nonetheless, my new financial security necessitates greater self-examination, literally, more looks in the mirror, to ensure the moral portion of my face doesn’t start decomposing right in front of me—like so many portraits by Francis Bacon. Which brings me to my ultimate question, can one recover from a life of property crime, and is it even necessary? I mean, doesn’t society owe everyone a living, and doesn’t economic inequality justify my takings? I know those are rationalizations, weak as raspberry leaf tea. Still, how much do I really need, and how much do they really not need, and is enough ever enough, especially given the orgasmic nature of illegitimate acquisition?
Some questions really shouldn’t be asked.
How to Crush a Car
Grampa Abe was the scrap-metal king of Monroe,
Georgia. He began with Atlanta’s rags in the 1920s,
moved on to dry goods, then got a taste of scrap
metal—rusted radiators, toasters, antique stoves.
In ’47, two weeks after purchasing his first
crashed Chevy he said, “My dance card will be filled
with accidents”—and his world evolved to totaled sedans
and wagons. When wealth hit in ’59 he bought a ’60
Caddy, then belly laughed as he smashed it to sharp, shiny
pieces, while the Jew-excluding, old-money, country-club
barons sipped their Wild Turkey and spectated. Three years
later he threw down the gold-embossed invite, crushing it
with his heel, looked me in the eye and said,
“Some day the world will be a better place.”
Gary Grossman’s father (right) receiving a military commendation during World War II
Orphan
Raised by my single
Mom and her parents,
I’ve been an orphan
since they passed
in the ‘70s, while
Dad—a truant for every
day of father-son school,
knew me last as an
embryo:
function really does
follow form.
A Backflip of Language
Daughter number two,
toddling at twenty-three
months; strawberry-blond ringlets,
a remake of Shirley Temple.
Cornflower-blue eyes and lucid
skin—a still drying portrait
turning heads of strangers
in the vegetable aisle.
Visiting her Uncle Harald
her ears flip a summersault. His
name somehow transforms
into Uncle Horrible. Maybe
he shouldn't have done his mad-dog
growl, used for frat-boy initiations
and joke-scaring his own small sons.
Decades later he fondly
remains “Uncle Horrible,”
a nickname sticky as bubble gum
on a Macon sidewalk in July—
a spot, but not a stain.
Bruised Old Apples
Like the thirty-eight dollar rondels at
Le Fromage Vert, Mom had a double-cream
illness—a paste of depression, tightly
waxed with a rind of mania. But fifty-four
years later, what remains are blurry mental
videos of her form, a sheer aqua nightgown
lying in puke and diarrhea—as if shot from
the last car of my bullet train of memory.
My wife says I’m less bruised than most old apples.
But doubt still sails my briny brain weekly,
and I can’t help but wonder if trauma
ever really heals, or just remains as hardened
layers of shellac on the interior walls of my skull.
My cell pings—a text from my youngest,
the neuroscientist.
To buy the book contact Gary:
gdgrossman@gmail.com
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