Inciting joy : essays

Title:

Author:

Gay, Ross, 1974- author.

Personal Author:

Gay, Ross, 1974- author.

ISBN:

9781643753041

Edition:

First Edition.

Physical Description:

248 pages ; 22 cm

Contents:

The first incitement -- Through my tears I saw (death: the second incitement) -- We kin (the garden: the third incitement) -- Out of time (time: the fourth incitement) -- Share your bucket! (skateboarding: the fifth incitement) -- Baby, this might by you. (laughter: the sixth incitement) -- (Dis)alienation machinery (losing your phone: the seventh incitement) -- Free fruit for all! (the orchard: the eighth incitement) -- Insurgent hoop (pickup basketball: the ninth incitement) -- How big the boat (the cover: the tenth incitement) -- Dispatch from the ruins (school: the eleventh incitement)-- Went Free (Dancing: The twelfth Incitement)-- Grief suite (falling apart: the thirteenth incitement) -- Oh, my heart (gratitude: the fourteenth incitement).

Abstract:

"A collection of long-form essays on joy, in which the author turns his curious and poetic mind to everything from skateboarding and cover songs, basketball and race, dancing and academia, death and laughter, and, always, the garden and the natural world"-- Provided by publisher

Subject Term:

Genre:

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Summary

From Ross Gay, the New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Delights, comes an intimate and electrifying collection of essays about the joy that comes from connection. "BRILLIANT." --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 care 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.

In "We Kin," Gay thinks about the garden (especially around August, when the zucchini and tomatoes come in) as a laboratory of mutual aid; in "Share Your Bucket," he explores skateboarding's reclamation of public spaces; 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 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?

Taking a clear-eyed look 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 fact, it just might help us survive.

"A gift that's meant to be shared . . . [This book] inspires us to look beyond the miseries of our era to envision a more welcoming future."― The Washington Post

Reviews (1)

Kirkus Review

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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.