Ross Gay – författare

A heart-warming and joyful collection of short lyric essays: the perfect pick-me-up in troubled times'Pure balm for your soul' CELESTE NG, author of Little Fires Everywhere'His delight is infectious. It's hard to read Gay and not to be won over'SEATTLE TIMESAmong Ross Gay's funny and philosophical delights: a friend's unabashed use of air quotes, cradling a tomato seedling aboard an aeroplane, the silent nod of acknowledgement between the only two black people in a room.More than anything, Gay celebrates the beauty of the natural world - his garden, the flowers peeking out of the sidewalk, the hypnotic movements of a praying mantis.The Book of Delights is about our shared bonds, and the rewards that come from a life closely observed, and serves as a powerful and necessary reminder that we can, and should, stake out a space in our lives for delight.

Bringing the Shovel Down maps the long and arduous process of being inculcated with the mythologies of state and power, the ramifications of that inculcation (largely, the loss of our humanity in the service of maintaining those mythologies), and finally, what it might mean, what it might provide us, if we were to transform those myths. The book, finally, has one underlying question: How might we better love one another?

A Library Journal Poetry Sure Bet of 2026 | Winner, 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award | Winner, 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award | Finalist, 2015 NAACP Image Awards | Finalist, 2015 National Book Award | Named to The Atlantic's Best American Poetry of the 21st Century ListCatalog of Unabashed Gratitude is a sustained meditation on that which goes away—loved ones, the seasons, the earth as we know it—that tries to find solace in the processes of the garden and the orchard. That is, this is a book that studies the wisdom of the garden and orchard, those places where all—death, sorrow, loss—is converted into what might, with patience, nourish us.

Winner, 2021 PEN/Jean Stein Award | Winner, 2021 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry | Winner, 2022 Indiana Author Award in PoetryBe Holding is a love song to legendary basketball player Julius Erving—known as Dr. J—who dominated courts in the 1970s and ‘80s as a small forward for the Philadelphia ‘76ers, as well as over his career in both the NBA and ABA. But this book-length poem is more than just an ode to a magnificent athlete. Through a kind of lyric research, or lyric meditation, Ross Gay connects Dr. J’s famously impossible move from the 1980 NBA Finals against the Los Angeles Lakers to pick-up basketball and the flying Igbo and the Middle Passage, to photography and surveillance and state violence, to music and personal histories of flight and familial love. Be Holding wonders how the imagination, or how our looking, might make us, or bring us, closer to each other. How our looking might make us reach for each other. And might make us be reaching for each other. And how that reaching might be something like joy.

'Punchy and compassionate' OBSERVERA collection of gorgeously written and timely pieces in which prize-winning poet and author Ross Gay considers the joy we incite when we care for each other, especially during life's inevitable hardships.In "We Kin" he thinks about the garden (especially around August, when the zucchini and tomatoes come on) as a laboratory of mutual aid; in "Share Your Bucket" he explores skate-boarding's reclamation of public space; he considers the costs of masculinity in "Grief Suite"; and in "Through My Tears I Saw," he recognizes what was healed in caring for his father as he was dying.In an era when divisive voices take up so much air space, Inciting Joy offers a vital alternative: what might be possible if we turn our attention to what brings us together? Full of energy, curiosity, and compassion, it is essential reading from one of our most brilliant writers.

A collection of gorgeously written and timely pieces in which prize-winning poet and author Ross Gay considers the joy we incite when we care for each other, especially during life's inevitable hardships.In "We Kin" he thinks about the garden (especially around August, when the zucchini and tomatoes come on) as a laboratory of mutual aid; in "Share Your Bucket" he explores skate-boarding's reclamation of public space; he considers the costs of masculinity in "Grief Suite"; and in "Through My Tears I Saw," he recognizes what was healed in caring for his father as he was dying.In an era when divisive voices take up so much air space, Inciting Joy offers a vital alternative: what might be possible if we turn our attention to what brings us together? Full of energy, curiosity, and compassion, it is essential reading from one of our most brilliant writers.

The New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Delights and Inciting Joy is back with exactly the book we need in these unsettling times."Yes, please. I'll have another dose of delight." -Margaret Roach, New York TimesIn Ross Gay's new collection of small, daily wonders, again written over the course of a year, one of America's most original voices continues his ongoing investigation of delight.For Gay, what delights us is what connects us, what gives us meaning, from the joy of hearing a nostalgic song blasting from a passing car to the pleasure of refusing the "nefarious" scannable QR code menus, from the tiny dog he fell hard for to his mother baking a dozen kinds of cookies for her grandchildren. As always, Gay revels in the natural world-sweet potatoes being harvested, a hummingbird carousing in the beebalm, a sunflower growing out of a wall around the cemetery, the shared bounty from a neighbour's fig tree-and the trillion mysterious ways this glorious earth delights us.The Book of (More) Delights is a volume to savour and share.

From bestselling author of The Book of Delights and award-winning poet Ross Gay, a fresh new volume of lyrical mini-essays celebrating the everyday that will inspire readers to rediscover the joys in the world around us.The author of the New York Times bestselling The Book of Delights is back with a new record of small wonders-and it is exactly the book we need right now.In this second intimate collection of short, lyrical, genre-defying essays, again written daily over a year, one of America's most original and observant voices celebrates the ordinary, helping us see our extraordinary world anew. Among Ross Gay's funny, poetic, philosophical delights: bonding with a pipsqueak of a puppy, observing how his mother bakes eighteen kinds of cookies before her grandchildren arrive, noticing the tenderness he feels when he sees an adult wearing braces, and the recognition that for him the preamble is often more delightful than the thing itself: "Putting on your socks and tying up your shoes, and, if you're the type, filling up your water bottle and doing some light stretching, but skipping the walk entirely."For Gay, practicing delight is an act of defiance in an often unjust world, as necessary as breathing. Even as he acknowledges racism, consumerism, ecological devastation, and our individual sorrows-he shows us that the un-delights make the delights even more so. As always, Gay revels in natural world-a hummingbird carousing in the beebalm, the garlic that grows abundantly in his garden (along with collards and kale leaves and purple osaka mustards, pineapple sage, sweet potatoes, etc.), a field of sunflowers turning toward the sun, the shared bounty from a neighbor's fig tree-and the trillion mysterious ways this glorious earth delights us.

An exploration of the various ways language can help us transcend both the banal and unusual cruelties which are inevitably delivered to us, and which we equally deliver unto others. These poems comb through violence and love, fear and loss, exploring the common denominators in each. Against Which seeks the ways human beings might transform themselves from participants in a thoughtless and brutal world to laborers in a loving one.