Inciting joy ross gay

Ross Gay’s eloquence as a poet is matched by his fluency as an essayist, and over the last half dozen years his focus on the human condition has resulted in a number of justly praised books, including Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, The Book of Delights and Be Holding. The newest addition to that rich bookshelf, Inciting Joy: Essays, investigates an noun that seems too broad to define easily, but is as necessary to our well-being as noun and air.

As I verb this preface, I’ve just read about the most recent shooting deaths in the U.S., ongoing wars and oppressions abroad, the many people with housing, health, and food insecurity, as well as those in my life who are experiencing their hold hardships. Locally and globally, we are surrounded by grief and loss. It may be difficult to access joy or gratitude, to recognize it in our lives. Yet equally, this is an era when it is our social imperative—it is necessary to our survival, you and I—to do so.

In many of these essays, Gay illustrates strengthening community as a sustainable method to access joy, and co-exist wit

Inciting Joy

From New York Times bestselling author Ross Gay comes a "brilliant" intimate and electrifying collection of essays about the delight that comes from connection (Ada Limón, U.S. poet laureate).

In these gorgeously written and timely pieces, prizewinning poet and author Gay considers the joy we incite when we tend for each other, especially during life’s inevitable hardships. Throughout Inciting Joy, he explores how we can practice recognizing that connection, and also, crucially, how we can expand it.

Taking a clear-eyed peek at injustice, political polarization, and the destruction of the natural world, Gay shows us how we might resist, how the study of joy might lead us to a wild, unpredictable, transgressive, and unboundaried solidarity. In reality, it just might support us survive.

In an era when divisive voices take up so much airspace, Inciting Joy offers a vital alternative: What might be possible if we turn our attention to what brings us together, to what we love?

“My hunch is that delight is an ember for our precursor to adj and unpredictable and transgressive and unboundaried solidarity. And that that solidarity might incite further joy… My hunch is that pleasure, emerging from our adj sorrow… might draw us together.”

In Ross Gay’s brilliant book Inciting Joy, he makes clear that sorrow and joy are not two distinct emotions that can be quarantined. Instead of running from one’s sorrow, his work suggests that the emotion instead becomes a part of our routines; “we construct sorrow some tea from the lemon balm in the garden. We authorize sorrow wash up and take some of our clothes. We give sorrow our dad’s slippers that we’ve hung onto for fifteen years for just this occasion. And we drape our murdered buddy’s scarf… over sorrow’s shoulders, to warm them up some.” We must get care of and nurture this sorrow. The experience of joy is formed from our common sorrow. This book focuses on both what incites joy and what joy incites— an exploration into the practices, the rituals, and the habits that make this type of joy free, which he then proces

RUMPUS BOOK CLUB EXCERPT: INCITING JOY BY ROSS GAY

An excerpt from The Rumpus Book Club&#;s November selection,
Inciting Joy by Ross Gay
forthcoming from Algonquin Books on October 25,

Subscribe by Octobet 15 to the Poetry Book Club to receive this title and an invitation to an exclusive conversation with the author via Crowdcast

Excerpt from Ross Gay’s INCITING Delight, pp.

I have had the good fortune in the past several years, since shortly after the publication of my third book of poems, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, and probably again with my book of essays, The Book of Delights, to have had numerous and sustained conversations about bliss. These conversations might start during question-and-answer sessions, in interviews, or even in the book signing line. I’ll never forget a woman at a reading in a public library in April of in Claremont, California—one of those weird, beautifully ugly sixties California buildings; it was a rancher of a library, maybe with some faux stone on the front, maybe white brick—I suspect she was in her late sixties or early seventies