As he guides us through his daily meditations on delight—a yearlong task he set for himself on his forty-second birthday—Gay’s poetic skill seeps through every observation. He shares his thoughts candidly as they flow from birthdays, gardens, strangers, and high-fives to empathy, death, race, and gender. Rather than ignore the undelightful, Gay shows us that joy exists not in spite of, but in conversation with, our suffering—the dark and the light together knit his delights into being. Through each of his 102 essayettes, Gay writes with humor, gentleness, and unabashed love to remind us that there are plenty of reasons for us to delight, and enough to share.
Ross Gay is the author of four books of poetry and three essay collections. He received his undergraduate degree from Lafayette College, earned an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, and holds a PhD in English from Temple University. He is currently a professor of English at Indiana University in Bloomington and teaches poetry in the low-residency MFA program at Drew University.
Gay’s devotion to cultivating joy amid the mundanity and precarity of day-to-day life is exemplary, and his featured collection prompts much-needed celebration of the small wonders and deep connections that define our shared existence.