OCTOBER 2022 - AudioFile
Poet Ross Gay narrates his recent collection of essays, which explore what it means to incite joy, even during our greatest hardships and trials. The works explore gratitude and the practice of joy even in a world assaulted by racism, sexism, and destructive business practices. Gay performs his audiobook as a poet would, with careful and thoughtful tone and emphasis in his voice. His delivery adds authenticity to a beautiful blend of powerful messages and a joyful performance that sticks with the listener. V.B. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
★ 07/18/2022
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. (Oct.)
From the Publisher
Gay is able to write so beautifully and leaves the reader unable to put the book down!”—Her Campus
“Gay is a true ray of sunshine in an often dark world. He sees the world for what it is and finds the joy and delight in it with intelligence, generosity and insight.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“Enthusiastic and generous… Inciting Joy cries out to be heard, to be read aloud in the author’s own emphatic voice. So, keep an eye out — rather, an ear open — for the audiobook. It may be the best way to extract maximum joy from this work.”—Washington Independent Review of Books
“Another dazzling collection of lyric essays… it thrilled me every time a long passage took me for a ride to somewhere I couldn't previously imagine. Just as satisfying are his footnotes, some of which contain entire sub-essays tucked away at the bottom of the pages, like treasures waiting to be discovered.”—Salon.com
"As you might expect from a poet, Gay’s essays are rendered in careful and evocative prose. In keeping with his inquiry, they are at times filled with happiness and, at other times, thick with grief. Throughout it all, they are powerful."—Book Riot
“Gay’s gorgeous, conversational storytelling builds into a politically incisive manifesto which brings sharp focus to what is essential in our human quest for love and connection. I want to give this book to everyone I know.”—The Harvard Gazette
“Inciting Joy by Ross Gay is a gorgeous and, at times, challenging collection of essays that invite us to consider what real joy and connection look like.”—Book Riot
Pulitzer Prize–winning author Chris Hedges
Ross Gay is as insightful and lyrical as an essayist as he is as a poet. His essays are as trenchant as they are moving, finding in the minutiae of life the grand themes of human existence.”
Library Journal
10/01/2022
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
OCTOBER 2022 - AudioFile
Poet Ross Gay narrates his recent collection of essays, which explore what it means to incite joy, even during our greatest hardships and trials. The works explore gratitude and the practice of joy even in a world assaulted by racism, sexism, and destructive business practices. Gay performs his audiobook as a poet would, with careful and thoughtful tone and emphasis in his voice. His delivery adds authenticity to a beautiful blend of powerful messages and a joyful performance that sticks with the listener. V.B. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2022-07-30
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.
