Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude

Like one big celebration bursting with joy . . . Gay's poems burst forth in leggy, unexpected ways, zooming in on legs furred with pollen or soil breast-stroking into the xylem. Gay's praise is Whitmanesque, full of manure, mulberry-stained purple bird poop, dirty clothes and hangovers, but also the pleasure of bare feet, of pruning a peach tree, of feeding a neighbor. . . . Whether you're feeling like you have a whole brass band of gratitude or if you're feeling like you only have a rusty horn, read this book. Gay even thanks you for reading it, saying 'I can't stop my gratitude, which includes dear reader, you for staying here with me, for moving your lips just so as I speak.'

Sweetness recurs in Gay’s collection, in the form of abundant fruit—figs, pears, berries—and in the dominant emotion of these poems: joy. Here, even death is transformed into the syrupy juice of a stone fruit dripping down a chin. Gay describes sprinkling his father’s ashes at the base of a tree and then finding the dead man’s spirit transferred into its bounty, “almost dancing now in the plum, / in the tree, the way he did as a person.” The poems are redolent of spring, full of verdant growth and birdsong. Perhaps such happy poetry shouldn’t be so unusual, but Gay’s odes to such everyday pleasures as sleeping in his clothes or drinking water from his hands bring a rare satisfaction. “Friends this is the realest place I know, / it makes me squirm like a worm I am so grateful,” he writes in one poem, and this sentiment captures it all, both the cheerful squirming and the gratitude simply for being alive.

Ross Gay offers up a muscled poetry of a thousand surprises, giving us a powerful collection that fireworks even the bleakest nights with ardency and grace. Few contemporary poets risk singing such a singular compassion for the wounded world with this kind of inimitable musicality, intelligence, and intoxicating joy.

Ross Gay is a fresh voice in American poetry. His poems are fast-paced, carefully crafted with great attention to detail of those he writes about and the images that surround him. His poetry consists of beautiful metaphors and startling images.

These poems are shout-outs to earth's abundance: the fruits, blooms, meals, insects, waters, conversations, trees, embraces, and helping hands—the taken-for-granted wonders that make life worth living, even in the face of death. Lyric and narrative, elegy and epithalamion, intoxicated and intoxicating—expansive, but breathlessly uttered, urgent. Ross Gay has much to say to you—yes, dear reader, you—and you definitely want to hear it.

In this bright book of life, Ross Gay lopes through the whole alphabet of emotions, from anger to zest. Merely considering the letter 'R,' for example, these poems are by turns racy, rollicking, reflective, rambunctious, raunchy, and rhapsodic. Praise and lamentation rub shoulders, along with elegy and elation, and every page is dazzling.

Almost no one has the faith Gay seems to have in poetry's ability to tap grace from the happenings of his life. . . . He looks to the act of writing as real alchemy, and death, disappointment, and inequity become honey in his hands.

Gay drops a third collection that follows through on its title's promise: these simple, joyful poems read like a litany of what's good in the world.

Unabashed gratitude may be what Gay most wants us to notice and appreciate in his work, but getting-to-the-point is the most unabashed gesture of his project. Yet in his most vibrant poems, the getting-there is much more affecting than his destinations. The embracing, intimate sound of his speech is the pleasure.