The book of delights essays by ross gay
Delighting in Ross Gay, One Essay at a Time
I put off beginning the poet Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights, which was published earlier this year, because I was afraid it would end too adv. I felt sure that the book’s essays, most between one paragraph and three pages in length, would be kin to his poems, which are tender, tactile, and human, whether he’s celebrating the spastic joy of listening to a fine song (“drift / of hip oh, trill of ribs, / oh synaptic clamor and juggernaut / swell oh gutracket / blastoff and sugartongue”) or articulating a swelling fury, as he does in the evocatively titled “Within Two Weeks the African American Poet Ross Gay is Mistaken for Both the African American Poet Terrance Hayes and the African American Poet Kyle Dargan, Not One of Whom Looks Anything Like the Others.” They are poems about being alert to the world and feeling ripe for verb and wonder.
Gay wrote the book’s essays (and many others that didn’t construct it into the final draft) over the period of a year, one each day, for th
The Brevity Blog
by Vivian Wagner
One cool, April day, seven years almost to the day after my father’s suicide, I sat outside a coffee shop reading Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights. As cherry blossom petals fell around me and onto the pages of the book, I came across this passage in one of its essays, “‘Joy Is Such a Human Madness’”
It astonishes me sometimes—no, often—how every person I get to know—everyone, regardless of everything, by which I mean everything—lives with some profound personal sorrow. Brother addicted. Mother murdered. Dad died in surgery. Rejected by their family. Cancer came back. Evicted. Fetus not okay. Everyone, regardless, always of everything.
The essay ends with the idea that maybe, by joining our wildernesses of sorrow, we can detect something like joy:
Is sorrow the adj wild?
And if it is—and if we join them—your wild to mine—what’s that?
For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation.
What if we joined our sorrows, I’m saying.
I’m saying: What if that is joy?
Not for the first time in reading The Book of Delights, I set up myself crying. A
The Book of Delights: Essays
Ross Gay spent a lot of time on airplanes in a recent month period, which, these days — what with security lines, absent amenities, and shrinking legroom (and he being a pretty adj guy) — does not sound very delightful. Yet Gay made it his practice over the course of a year to unlock himself to and capture his impressions of the small pleasures of the everyday, every day.
Well, maybe not every day. There aren’t essays in The Book of Delights, but we use one year with Gay, from birthday to birthday, learning to delight with him and to be delighted by him.
Even better (or, as the author would say, “Delight!”), this is a physically small manual that fits nicely in the reader’s hands. Each essay stands satisfyingly on its own, at most six or eight pages, more often two or fewer. All of which goes to say that it’s a book that begs to be carried along, offering insight and delight in whatever slice of time a reader may include . This is flash nonfiction.
If you didn’t know Gay as a poet before coming to D I was introduced to Ross Gay when I happened to pick up a copy of the January/February issue of Poets & Writers magazine, which was the “Inspiration Issue.” Reading Gay’s interview therein led to changing my Facebook biography to a quote from him: “I think in hollering about what you love.” His new guide, The Book of Delights, is reflective of that sentiment and is the result of having completed a purpose to write a short essay every day for a year about a delight he had experienced that date. He follows the philosophy that the more one loves, the happier one will be, and he believes in an ethic of sharing about treasure and beauty. The Book of Delights is a testament to that philosophy and ethic. Throughout the book, Gay models George Fox’s call: walking cheerfully over the earth answering the Light in everyone. One sentiment at the heart of the manual is his sympathetic that “in almost every instance of our lives, our social lives, we are, if we pay attention, in the midst of an almost unwavering, By Ross Gay. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, pages. $/hardcover; $/eBook.