As Heard on NPR's This American Life: The New York Times bestselling book that celebrates ordinary delights in the world around us by one of America's most original and observant writers and the author of Inciting Joy, award-winning poet Ross Gay. Pre-order The Book of (More) Delights now, too!

Ross Gay's eye lands upon wonder at every turn, bolstering my belief in the countless small miracles that surround us. --Tracy K. Smith, Pulitzer Prize winner and U.S. Poet Laureate

The winner of the National Book Critics Award for Poetry offers up a spirited collection of short lyrical essays, written daily over a tumultuous year, reminding us of the purpose and pleasure of praising, extolling, and celebrating ordinary wonders.

In The Book of Delights, one of today's most original literary voices offers up a genre-defying volume of lyric essays written over one tumultuous year. The first nonfiction book from award-winning poet Ross Gay is a record of the small joys we often overlook in our busy lives. Among Gay's funny, poetic, philosophical delights: a friend's unabashed use of air quotes, cradling a tomato seedling aboard an airplane, the silent nod of acknowledgment between the only two black people in a room. But Gay never dismisses the complexities, even the terrors, of living in America as a black man or the ecological and psychic violence of our consumer culture or the loss of those he loves. More than anything else, though, Gay celebrates the beauty of the natural world-his garden, the flowers peeking out of the sidewalk, the hypnotic movements of a praying mantis.

The Book of Delights is about our shared bonds, and the rewards that come from a life closely observed. These remarkable pieces serve as a powerful and necessary reminder that we can, and should, stake out a space in our lives for delight.

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?

From bestselling author of The Book of Delights and award-winning poet, a book of lyrical mini-essays celebrating the everyday that will inspire readers to rediscover the joys in the world around us.

The author of the New York Times bestselling The Book of Delights is back with a new record of small wonders--and it is exactly the book we need right now.

In this second intimate collection of short, lyrical, genre-defying essays, again written daily over a year, one of America's most original and observant voices celebrates the ordinary, helping us see our extraordinary world anew. Among Ross Gay's funny, poetic, philosophical delights: bonding with a pipsqueak of a puppy, observing how his mother bakes eighteen kinds of cookies before her grandchildren arrive, noticing the tenderness he feels when he sees an adult wearing braces, and the recognition that for him the preamble is often more delightful than the thing itself: Putting on your socks and tying up your shoes, and, if you're the type, filling up your water bottle and doing some light stretching, but skipping the walk entirely.

For Gay, practicing delight is an act of defiance in an often unjust world, as necessary as breathing. Even as he acknowledges racism, consumerism, ecological devastation, and our individual sorrows--he shows us that the un-delights make the delights even more so. As always, Gay revels in natural world--a hummingbird carousing in the beebalm, the garlic that grows abundantly in his garden (along with collards and kale leaves and purple osaka mustards, pineapple sage, sweet potatoes, etc.), a field of sunflowers turning toward the sun, the shared bounty from a neighbor's fig tree--and the trillion mysterious ways this glorious earth delights us.

Lace & Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens

Originally published by Organic Weapon Arts in 2014, Lace & Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens captures seasonal changes and life unfolding from the perspective of two gardens: Ross Gay and Aimee Nezhukumatathil. What began as an unprompted poem correspondence between the two poets in the late July swelter of 2011 blossomed into a beautiful collection of epistolary poetry.

This reprint of Lace & Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens by Get Fresh Books Publishing comprises all of its original poetry and includes an interview published by The Margins titled, Our Wholeness, Our Togetherness: A Conversation with Aimee Nezhukumatathil & Ross Gay.

Ross Gay is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His New York Times best-selling collection of essays, The Book of Delights, was released by Algonquin Books in 2019. Ross is a founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a non-profit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy project. He also works on The Tenderness Project with Shayla Lawson and Essence London. He has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Ross teaches at Indiana University.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the New York Times best-selling author of WORLD OF WONDERS: IN PRAISE OF FIREFLIES, WHALE SHARKS, & OTHER ASTONISHMENTS, finalist for the Kirkus Prize in non-fiction, and recently named the Barnes and Noble Book of the Year. She is also the author of four books of poetry, and is poetry editor of SIERRA, the national magazine of the Sierra Club. Awards for her writing include a fellowship from the Mississippi Arts Council, Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for poetry, National Endowment of the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Her writing has appeared in NYTimes Magazine, ESPN Magazine, and twice in Best American Poetry. She is professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi's MFA program.

Be Holding is a love song to legendary basketball player Julius Erving--known as Dr. J--who dominated courts in the 1970s and '80s as a small forward for the Philadelphia '76ers, as well as over his career in both the NBA and ABA. But this book-length poem is more than just an ode to a magnificent athlete. Through a kind of lyric research, or lyric meditation, Ross Gay connects Dr. J's famously impossible move from the 1980 NBA Finals against the Los Angeles Lakers to pick-up basketball and the flying Igbo and the Middle Passage, to photography and surveillance and state violence, to music and personal histories of flight and familial love. Be Holding wonders how the imagination, or how our looking, might make us, or bring us, closer to each other. How our looking might make us reach for each other. And might make us be reaching for each other. And how that reaching might be something like joy.

As Heard on NPR's This American Life: The New York Times bestselling book of essays celebrating ordinary delights in the world around us by one of America's most original and observant writers, award-winning poet Ross Gay. Pre-order The Book of (More) Delights now, too!

Ross Gay's eye lands upon wonder at every turn, bolstering my belief in the countless small miracles that surround us. --Tracy K. Smith, Pulitzer Prize winner and U.S. Poet Laureate

The winner of the NBCC Award for Poetry offers up a spirited collection of short lyrical essays, written daily over a tumultuous year, reminding us of the purpose and pleasure of praising, extolling, and celebrating ordinary wonders.

In The Book of Delights, one of today's most original literary voices offers up a genre-defying volume of lyric essays written over one tumultuous year. The first nonfiction book from award-winning poet Ross Gay is a record of the small joys we often overlook in our busy lives. Among Gay's funny, poetic, philosophical delights: a friend's unabashed use of air quotes, cradling a tomato seedling aboard an airplane, the silent nod of acknowledgment between the only two black people in a room. But Gay never dismisses the complexities, even the terrors, of living in America as a black man or the ecological and psychic violence of our consumer culture or the loss of those he loves. More than anything else, though, Gay celebrates the beauty of the natural world-his garden, the flowers peeking out of the sidewalk, the hypnotic movements of a praying mantis.

The Book of Delights is about our shared bonds, and the rewards that come from a life closely observed. These remarkable pieces serve as a powerful and necessary reminder that we can, and should, stake out a space in our lives for delight.

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?

From bestselling author of The Book of Delights and award-winning poet, a book of lyrical mini-essays celebrating the everyday that will inspire readers to rediscover the joys in the world around us.

In Ross Gay's new collection of small, daily wonders, again written over the course of a year, one of America's most original voices continues his ongoing investigation of delight.

For Gay, what delights us is what connects us, what gives us meaning, from the joy of hearing a nostalgic song blasting from a passing car to the pleasure of refusing the nefarious scannable QR code menus, from the tiny dog he fell hard for to his mother baking a dozen kinds of cookies for her grandchildren. As always, Gay revels in the natural world--sweet potatoes being harvested, a hummingbird carousing in the beebalm, a sunflower growing out of a wall around the cemetery, the shared bounty from a neighbor's fig tree--and the trillion mysterious ways this glorious earth delights us.

The Book of (More) Delights is a volume to savor and share.

Bringing the Shovel Down maps the long and arduous process of being inculcated with the mythologies of state and power, the ramifications of that inculcation (largely, the loss of our humanity in the service of maintaining those mythologies), and finally, what it might mean, what it might provide us, if we were to transform those myths. The book, finally, has one underlying question: How might we better love one another?

An exploration of the various ways language can help us transcend both the banal and unusual cruelties which are inevitably delivered to us, and which we equally deliver unto others. These poems comb through violence and love, fear and loss, exploring the common denominators in each. Against Which seeks the ways human beings might transform themselves from participants in a thoughtless and brutal world to laborers in a loving one.