Be Holding

Be 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.

More Praise

Ross Gay’s work is not only celebratory. It is also an exegesis on loss, grief, prejudice, shame, and the improbability of grace in our lives—especially in Black lives.

Boston Review

A unique work of form and substance.

The Millions

Impossible, unprecedented, right-before-your eyes but defying logic and the laws of nature.

RHINO

In turning an instance of athletic prowess and grace into an expansive metaphoric vision, Gay pulls off a syntactical tour de force.

Kenyon Review

Be Holding is an unabashedly ambitious work with a voracious, yet tender gaze.

Baltimore Art

Gay’s poem theorizes an ethics that is inescapably political, and its ebullient gratitude, fore and aft, reads not just as an overflow of thankfulness but as a concrete practice of the ethics Gay suggests. It is the kind of practice that eschews literary competition and anxieties of influence; it is the kind of practice that, in contrast to a death-dealing drive to possess, gives and receives gifts—books, saplings, time, poetic lines—with open hands.

Ploughshares

Be Holding is at once an astounding tour de force and a provocative meditation on suffering and jubilation.

The Lake

It's a beautiful, moving account of love, triumph against the odds and how we might better reach out to each other.

People.com

Be Holding is as beguiling as it is urgent, equal parts agonizing and ecstatic. It is a critical work of reckoning for this fraught moment in which many of us are wondering how we might move forward despite the devastation we have wrought, both in our particular American context, and in our world as a whole.

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Table of Contents

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