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Inciting Joy: Essays
"BRILLIANT." -Ada Limón, U.S. poet laureate
An intimate and electrifying collection of essays from the New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Delights.
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2022
In these gorgeously written and timely pieces, prizewinning poet and author Ross 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.
In "We Kin," Gay thinks about the garden (especially around August, when the zucchini and tomatoes come in) as a laboratory of mutual aid; in "Share Your Bucket," he explores skateboarding's reclamation of public spaces; he considers the costs of masculinity in "Grief Suite"; and in "Through My Tears I Saw," he recognizes what was healed in caring for his father as he was dying.
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?
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.
An intimate and electrifying collection of essays from the New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Delights.
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2022
In these gorgeously written and timely pieces, prizewinning poet and author Ross 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.
In "We Kin," Gay thinks about the garden (especially around August, when the zucchini and tomatoes come in) as a laboratory of mutual aid; in "Share Your Bucket," he explores skateboarding's reclamation of public spaces; he considers the costs of masculinity in "Grief Suite"; and in "Through My Tears I Saw," he recognizes what was healed in caring for his father as he was dying.
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?
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.
Editorial Reviews
"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 Limón, U.S. Poet Laureate
"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
"In essays that are lyrical, pensive, and surprising, poet Gay sheds light on all the places joy can lurk […] Gay's a remarkable writer, and the collection makes for a spellbinding meditation on the ways joy deepens and grows in the company of grief, fear, and loss."―Publishers Weekly, best book of 2022: nonfiction
"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
"Written over the course of the pandemic, Gay ponders joy, defining it less as the absence of sorrow and rather as our response to it."―CNN.com
"The award-winning poet considers joy – how we incite it, how we can expand it and most importantly, how we experience it by caring for others – in this timely collection that defies divisiveness."―USA Today
"A gift that's meant to be shared […] inspires us to look beyond the miseries of our era to envision a more welcoming future, Gay…offer[s] a concept of joy akin to what Audre Lorde conceptualized in her essay ‘Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.' Get yourself a copy of Inciting Joy, then gift yourself the great pleasure of giving it away."―The Washington P...
"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
"In essays that are lyrical, pensive, and surprising, poet Gay sheds light on all the places joy can lurk […] Gay's a remarkable writer, and the collection makes for a spellbinding meditation on the ways joy deepens and grows in the company of grief, fear, and loss."―Publishers Weekly, best book of 2022: nonfiction
"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
"Written over the course of the pandemic, Gay ponders joy, defining it less as the absence of sorrow and rather as our response to it."―CNN.com
"The award-winning poet considers joy – how we incite it, how we can expand it and most importantly, how we experience it by caring for others – in this timely collection that defies divisiveness."―USA Today
"A gift that's meant to be shared […] inspires us to look beyond the miseries of our era to envision a more welcoming future, Gay…offer[s] a concept of joy akin to what Audre Lorde conceptualized in her essay ‘Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.' Get yourself a copy of Inciting Joy, then gift yourself the great pleasure of giving it away."―The Washington P...
