January 27, 2026
Meghan O'Toole
Benjamin Goluboff releases new speculative biography in verse
Professor of English Benjamin Goluboff's new book, Moe Asch: A Speculative Life in Verse and Other Poems, combines poems inspired by the life of American record executive Moe Asch with a series on a relatively unknown American portraitist, and an eclectic selection called “Chicago, Arts and Letters, Other.”
Moe Asch, who lived from 1905 to 1986, was a prominent American record executive and son of controversial and provocative Yiddish-language novelist Sholem Asch. An enigmatic personality, Moe Asch became the subject for part one of Goluboff’s new collection.
“He was not a good person,” Goluboff shared. “He cheated on his wife, famously cheated his artists out of royalties, and was complicit in white people appropriating the culture of people of color. He was prone to crazy fits of anger.”
Goluboff combines humor with meditative reflections on the identity and life of the prominent music producer. The poems explore various vignettes of Asch’s life: parties, recording sessions, and ordering delivery. Asch was well-connected across the entertainment industry, and so the book includes cameo appearances by Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, Gwendolyn Brooks, and other notable figures of the twentieth century. The episodic nature of these encounters, Goluboff shared, lent itself well to a collection of poems.
In one poem, “Bob Dylan is an Area of Darkness in the Mind of Moe Asch, 1970s,” Goluboff imagines a situation where Asch lies awake, haunted by the one who got away: Bob Dylan. Asch, who was instrumental in the preservation and proliferation of American folk music tradition, never recorded Dylan. In another, “Moe Asch Records Nathan ‘Prince’ Nazaroff Performing ‘Tumbalalaika’ and Reflects on Not Knowing Yiddish, 1954,” Goluboff calls attention to the entanglement and fraught connections of language and identity.
Jeffery Renard Allen, author of Fat Time and Other Stories, shared insight on Goluboff’s new book: “Witty and weird, Benjamin Goluboff’s Moe Asch poems are a delight. With lean precision, Goluboff brings alive a seminal figure in the recording industry. History speaks. The music lives.”
The book’s second part focuses on George Peter Alexander Healy (1813-1894), an American painter whose impressive body of work was largely lost to the Great Chicago Fire in 1871. In the third and final segment of the book, Goluboff shares experiences in and around Chicago, a loveletter to the region punctuated by his experience as a professor.
Goluboff hopes that readers find some of the collection funny, and that they enjoy the Yiddish content: “I hope readers find it a delight.”
Moe Asch: A Speculative Life in Verse and Other Poems was published on November 17, 2025, by Kelsay Books.