Inciting Joy

Starred review from July 18, 2022
Poet Gay (The Book of Delights) examines in this stunning collection how joy deepens when accompanied by grief, fear, and loss. In “Joy and Losing Your Phone,” he describes relying on the help of strangers; “Joy and Death” is a reflection on losing his father to cancer; “Joy and Time” covers the privilege of not being “on the clock”; and in “Joy and Laughter,” he observes that “one of laughter’s qualities is that it can draw us together.” Gay gracefully turns from lighter pleasures (imagining a book about great album covers, for instance) to confronting cruelties, such as racist violence or the “brutal economy” of capitalism. “Grief Codex,” the longest and most intricate essay, touches on football, toxic masculinity, couples therapy, and grief: “we might always be holding each other through our falling,” Gay concludes, positing that “holding each other through the sorrow” is one definition of joy. Gay’s curiosity is present on every page (“I am a fan of the digression,” he writes) and his precise yet playful prose sparkles: a friend wears “a goldfinch of a grin,” while a mall parking lot “away from the cast even of the aged streetlights” is a safe space. This resonant, vivid meditation shouldn’t be missed. Agent: Liza Dawson, Liza Dawson Assoc.

August 15, 2022
A prizewinning poet's thoughts about grief, gratitude, and happiness. In a natural follow-up to his previous collection, The Book of Delights, Gay, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude, ruminates about joy in a warm, candid memoir composed of 12 essays. In prose that veers between breezy and soulful, the author reflects on a wide range of topics, including basketball, dancing, skateboarding, couples' therapy, music, masculinity, and his father's cancer. As a biracial man, he has much to say about race and racism. For Gay, cultivating joy involves mindful observation. Once, watching a chipmunk's antics, he wondered, "among other things, how many real-life chipmunks scaling sheer limestone walls do we miss when we're watching videos on our cellular telephones of chipmunks falling off walls?" Joy also emerges from "the mycelial threads connecting us, the lustrous web." The author praises a community orchard, which has created "a matrix of connection, of care, that exists not only in the here and now, but comes to us from the past and extends forward into the future." As a creative writing teacher, Gay rejects the workshop format, where students try to "fix" a classmate's poem. His teaching encourages "unfixing work together--where we hold each other, and witness each other, through our unfixing," sensitive to each student's reality. He seeks to break through academic "conventions and boundaries" to make a human--and humane--connection: "you ask, after someone shares a sort of upsetting and nervous-making poem, are you ok? Or someone, missing class sends a doctor's note and an x-ray of their broken bone as double proof, to which you reply: no need, I believe you." For Gay, community opens a path to joy. Even in grief, "grieving, or the griever, consciously or not, connects to all of grief, and to all grievers." A pleasingly digressive and intimate memoir in essays.

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September 1, 2022
Gay's (The Book of Delights, 2019) poetically influenced prose is nothing short of joyful. Blending the serious and the playful, this essay collection incites joy with writings about a wide range of actions and places: dancing, orchards, teaching, skateboarding, basketball courts, technology's absence, death, authentic gratitude, and more. Also wide-ranging is Gay's style, containing long, clause-filled sentences that make connections and build bridges. Footnotes deepen and parentheticals expand, and Gay frequently offers humorous self-awareness. Talking to the reader about a joke he just made: ""You know I know it's horrible, right?"" Talking to himself about the essay he just started: ""Am I really going to start talk about 'masculinity' by talking about football?"" For Gay, joy is also incited by courage and honesty; his essays have a through line of offering the deeply personal and speaking truth to power. A standout example, ""Dispatch from the Ruins,"" lays bare the negligible relationship between graded ""outcomes"" and actual learning. Gay's pedagogy, explained in detail, disrupts the systems that are baseline incongruent with joy, as does his writing, in every sentence.

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October 1, 2022

Award-winning poet Gay (Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude) ruminates on the concept and practice of bringing forth joy. Similar to his previous collection, The Book of Delights, the essays are short and potent. In this volume, he makes abundant use of footnotes, which function as a kind of shadow narrative, offering asides, further meanderings, and elaborations. The tone is one of riffing and improvisation, as though Gay is having a lively but leisurely conversation with the reader. He demonstrates that he views the incitement of joy as an act of resistance. Joy is to be found in the collective, whether it be a community garden, a game of pick-up basketball, a writing class, or the sense of kinship one feels when bearing--and surviving--a loss. He writes movingly about his relationship with his father, who passed away in 2004, as well as about some of his own hardships. Humor is seeded throughout the collection, and Gay cites writers ranging from John Edgar Wideman to Gwendolyn Brooks to Robin Wall Kimmerer. The book may make readers wish it didn't end. VERDICT Gay is a treasure, and his latest offering will delight his fans as well as those new to his work.--Barrie Olmstead

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