The Book of Delights: Essays

Poet Gay (Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude) forays into prose with this collection of stirring, thought-provoking "essayettes" on the ways and means of delight. Spanning a year between Gay's 42nd and 43rd birthdays, the 102 pieces--each one dated--cover widely varied subject matter, including high-fiving strangers, nicknames, the movie Ghost, trains, and much more. "I am ultimately interested in joy," Gay declares, adding, "I am curious about the relationship between pleasure and delight." While "the pleasant, the delightful, are not universal," he also hypothesizes that "delight grows as we share it." But cataloguing delight isn't his sole motivation; from the opening entry, Gay challenges popular conceptions of masculinity, blackness, and the kinds of writing expected of black male authors, making explicit in one piece that for an African-American writer to focus on delight runs counter to a culture more accustomed to the "commodification of black suffering." Throughout, Gay presents himself as fallibly human rather than authoritative, capable of profundity and banality alike. One's reception of his work will depend on personal temperament; readers may be convinced of Gay's delight without necessarily sharing it. Nonetheless, he is a remarkable expositor of the positive, and his writings serve as reminders "of something deeply good in us." (Feb.)

Copyright 2018 Publishers Weekly, LLC Used with permission.

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"The delights he extols here (music, laughter, generosity, poetry, lots of nature) are bulwarks against casual cruelties. As such they feel purposeful and imperative as well as contagious in their joy."
—The New York Times Book Review

"These charming, digressive 'essayettes, ' in the manner of Montaigne, surprise and challenge . . . Gay, an award-winning poet, knows the value of formal constraint: his experiences of 'delight, ' recorded daily for a year, vary widely but yield revealing patterns through insights about everything from nature and the body to race and masculinity. The fruits of this experiment—for which gardens and gardening provide a frequent, apt metaphor—attest to an imagination cultivated in hostile conditions. Gay's optimism is as easy as it is improbable, his 'heart cooing like a pigeon nestled on a windowsill where the spikes rusted off.'"
—The New Yorker

"What emerges is not a ledger of delights passively logged but a radiant lens actively searching for and magnifying them, not just with the mind but with the body as an instrument of wonder-stricken presence."
—Brain Pickings, Favorite Books of 2019

"Ross Gay's poems are little celebrations of joy, and this book of mini-essays—each centering around a particular 'delight, ' from sleeping in your clothes to planting tomato seedlings to the nod of greeting between the only two black people in a room—is a pure balm for your soul. Savor one at a time every morning, this summer, or wolf them all down en masse on a gorgeous sunny day."
—Celeste Ng for GoodMorningAmerica.com

"Delightfully snackable . . . Pick it up, read for ten minutes (start anywhere, really), put it down, and you'll find that the delights of Gay's world illuminate the delights of yours, that his wonder is contagious and has caused you to deepen your own."
—GQ

"The shock of Gay's writing . . . is his seamless shift from breezy, affable observation to sober (and admittedly still affable) profundity . . . I want to say that Gay's writing is magical because that's the way it feels when I read it. But . . . calling it magic undercuts Gay's craft, the effort that goes into producing literature that feels as fluent and familiar as a chat with a close friend. His voice has integrity, in both senses of the word: a completeness or consistency, true to itself; and an honesty and compassion so frankly subjective that it produces an incorruptible vision. Gay's loose-limbed sentences diagram his delight, partaking in numerous asides—some as paragraph-long parentheticals—and equally numerous asides within asides, as well as nested subordinate clauses that are the purview of intimate conversation, not written prose. They are clauses and asides in which, as Gay writes them, you feel his hand on your arm, you feel him lean in toward you, conspiratorially or simply to emphasize his meaning."
—The New York Review of Books

"Everyone could use a bit more delight in their days . . . Gay, who is the winner of the NBCC Award for Poetry, is here to provide just that, with essays celebrating everything from air quotes to candy wrappers to pickup basketball games."
—New York Post

"The Book of Delights is both practice and perfection in an unassuming package . . . These pieces reflect and examine the natural world, masculinity, racism, and other topics with vibrancy. Most essays are a few paragraphs, a page or two at maximum, but it's not the width or length of the pieces that ultimately grabbed my attention. It was the heart and intelligence found within his daily introspections."
—The Rumpus

"A reminder of what the personal essay is best at: finding the profound in the mundane . . . his delight is infectious. It's hard to read Gay and not to be won over."
—Seattle Times

"This collection proves is that delight is infectious and demands to be shared, and, most importantly, 'our delight grows as we share it.'
—Washington Independent Review of Books

"It's the perfect read to inspire observing your corner of the world with a little more care and delight."
—NPR.org

"Sweet, powerful, funny, honest, moving. Gay has a new book on the way, too; I can't wait for it."
—Orange County Register