Inciting Joy: Essays

by Ross Gay

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

A guide to living freely with a sense of wonder along with compassion for ourselves and others, written by an acclaimed poet and essayist.

From New York Times bestselling author Ross Gay comes a "brilliant" intimate and electrifying collection of essays about the joy 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 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.   

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. 

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?   
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781643753959
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	10/08/2024
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	8.10(w) x 5.20(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Ross Gay is the New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Delights: Essays and four books of poetry. His Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude won the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award; and Be Holding won the 2021 PEN America Jean Stein Book Award. He is a founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a non-profit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy project. Gay has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He teaches at Indiana University.
 

Table of Contents

The First Incitement 1

Through My Tears I Saw (Death: The Second Incitement) 11

We Kin (The Garden: The Third Incitement) 28

Out of Time (Time: The Fourth Incitement) 43

Share Your Bucket! (Skateboarding: The Fifth Incitement) 57

Baby, This Might Be You, (Laughter: The Sixth Incitement) 66

(Dis)alienation Machinery (Losing Your Phone: The Seventh Incitement) 82

Free Fruit for All! (The Orchard: The Eighth Incitement) 94

Insurgent Hoop (Pickup Basketball: The Ninth Incitement) 112

How Big the Boat (The Cover: The Tenth Incitement) 123

Dispatch from the Ruins (School: The Eleventh Incitement) 137

Went Free (Dancing: The Twelfth Incitement) 171

Grief Suite (Failing Apart: The Thirteenth Incitement) 176

Oh, My Heart (Gratitude: The Fourteenth Incitement) 230

Acknowledgments 246

Editorial Reviews

Gay is able to write so beautifully and leaves the reader unable to put the book down!”—Her Campus

“Gay is a true ray of sunshine in an often dark world. He sees the world for what it is and finds the joy and delight in it with intelligence, generosity and insight.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“Enthusiastic and generous… Inciting Joy cries out to be heard, to be read aloud in the author’s own emphatic voice. So, keep an eye out — rather, an ear open — for the audiobook. It may be the best way to extract maximum joy from this work.”—Washington Independent Review of Books

“Another dazzling collection of lyric essays… it thrilled me every time a long passage took me for a ride to somewhere I couldn't previously imagine. Just as satisfying are his footnotes, some of which contain entire sub-essays tucked away at the bottom of the pages, like treasures waiting to be discovered.”—Salon.com

"As you might expect from a poet, Gay’s essays are rendered in careful and evocative prose. In keeping with his inquiry, they are at times filled with happiness and, at other times, thick with grief. Throughout it all, they are powerful."—Book Riot

“Gay’s gorgeous, conversational storytelling builds into a politically incisive manifesto which brings sharp focus to what is essential in our human quest for love and connection. I want to give this book to everyone I know.”—The Harvard Gazette

“Inciting Joy by Ross Gay is a gorgeous and, at times, challenging collection of essays that invite us to consider what real joy and connection look like.”—Book Riot

“[Gay’s] words are worth attending to. Inciting Joy is the perfect source for an essay to read while relaxing on the porch in August, especially if you love poetry, pausing, and pondering.”—Southwest Virginia Today

“Ross Gay’s essay on school is one of my favorite essays of all time, and it’s one I want to hand to every student, teacher, university faculty member, and parent I know. Spending time with his words is the next best thing to being in his class.”—Book Riot, "8 Back to School Books for Adults"

“Gay is an especially great writer to read in order to dive—or to tiptoe—into discussions of grief because he is able to still see the beauty in everything. It’s like having to do an exceptionally difficult thing while someone wraps you in the coziest blanket and assures you it’ll be okay.”—Book Riot, "6 Must-Read Essay Collections by Poets"

From the Publisher

Ross Gay is as insightful and lyrical as an essayist as he is as a poet. His essays are as trenchant as they are moving, finding in the minutiae of life the grand themes of human existence.”

Pulitzer Prize–winning author Chris Hedges

Poet Ross Gay narrates his recent collection of essays, which explore what it means to incite joy, even during our greatest hardships and trials. The works explore gratitude and the practice of joy even in a world assaulted by racism, sexism, and destructive business practices. Gay performs his audiobook as a poet would, with careful and thoughtful tone and emphasis in his voice. His delivery adds authenticity to a beautiful blend of powerful messages and a joyful performance that sticks with the listener. V.B. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

OCTOBER 2022 - AudioFile

Poet Ross Gay narrates his recent collection of essays, which explore what it means to incite joy, even during our greatest hardships and trials. The works explore gratitude and the practice of joy even in a world assaulted by racism, sexism, and destructive business practices. Gay performs his audiobook as a poet would, with careful and thoughtful tone and emphasis in his voice. His delivery adds authenticity to a beautiful blend of powerful messages and a joyful performance that sticks with the listener. V.B. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

OCTOBER 2022 - AudioFile

2022-07-30
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.

Kirkus Reviews