Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude
- Apr 26
- 2 min read
★★★★★
Why is it so much easier to review a bad or even middling book than it is a five-star rager? For the same reason, I suppose, it’s often easier to write about sorrow than joy. But Ross Gay isn’t having any of that. If the title of this collection didn’t tip you off, perhaps his collections of essays, The Book of Delights or Inciting Joy, might. Or, that his website’s About page opens with, “Ross Gay is interested in joy. Ross Gay wants to understand joy. Ross Gay is curious about joy. Ross Gay studies joy. Something like that.”
Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude is so good, I read it twice on my trip to Indiana, where I went to visit my grandmother in Indianapolis for her 90th birthday (talk about inciting joy!), and where I spent most of my time in Bloomington to visit friends, see the 75th running of the men’s Little 500 bicycle race and 38th running of the women’s (I coached a women’s team in 1992), and gather material for what I hope will become a Literary Landscapes essay on Ross Gay (who teaches at Indiana University and co-founded the Bloomington Community Orchard. It is so good, I immediately bought two copies to give to friends I thought could not live without it. It is so good, in fact, I want everything to be this good, not just poetry, but the world, the whole big, wide, stupid world that is hellbent on railing against joy and gratitude and mercy and kindness.
Friends (as Ross would say, and frequently, in his poems), I want you to run out and pick this book up and lose, or find—yes find!—yourself in it, and delight with me, with Ross, and with his poems about shirt buttons and fig trees, plum trees and burials, spoons and ugly feet, water and wildflowers, orchards and community, and, in the book’s eponymous poem, which, as I read again right now wells tears of joy, there’s the world, the whole big, wide, stupid world that swells with all the things I want the world to swell with, with thanks and thanks and thanks and that ends, “what do you think / this singing and shuddering is, / what this screaming and reaching and dancing / and crying is, other than loving / what every second goes away? / Goodbye, I mean to say. / And thank you. Every day.”
Comments