Overview

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?

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9781643753959

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Reviews

Stunning...Gay's curiosity is present on every page and his precise yet playful prose sparkles...This resonant, vivid meditation shouldn't be missed. --Publishers Weekly (starred review) Inciting Joy is a book that will break your heart. Ross Gay will break your heart. He will break it and advocate for breaking it over and over. Why? So we can choose our life, our survival, our full humanity. Inciting Joy is brilliant because it's not just a book; it's proof that the way we carve out room for joy is by acknowledging our constant teacher: sorrow. -- Ada Limon, author of The Hurting Kind: Poems 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. --Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winner and author of War is Force that Gives us Meaning and America: The Farewell Tour This is instantly one of my favorite books ever. A wondering-aloud to which I will be returning often, and a brilliant manifesto making a case for joy as a thing which is as complex and rigorous as it is lovely and free. In that sneaky way Ross Gay has of lovingly disarming you before getting you to dwell in rooms of your heart you'd left vacant, Inciting Joy uses its titular emotion as a window into sorrow and rage, into gifts and loss, into the tricky business of being alive. --Eve L. Ewing, author of Ghosts in The Schoolyard, Electric Arches, and Marvel Comic's Ironheart series Ross Gay's work throws off so much light, I've often wondered if it was powered by a superior energy source. He has done something new and beautiful with INCITING JOY. He has sunk a bioluminescent depth-charge into our time, one which peers into the whole sea of experience around us: revealing it full of connection, mystery and a longing for relief. --John Freeman, founder of Freeman's literary magazine and (most recently) editor of The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story In this masterful, raw, and stirring collection of essays, Ross Gay has once again coaxed his readers to awaken to our full humanity. Inciting Joy will make you gasp in wonderment as your truest truths are laid bare, and you will go back and reread the lines over and over, whispering, 'This, yes, this!' --Leah Penniman, co-founder of Soul Fire Farm and author of Farming While Black

Author Information

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.

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