Whether discussing a literal act of horticulture or its metaphorical extension, Gay uses cultivation and tending to question how we create and connect our interior and exterior spaces. Gay is fascinated with nature and human nature alike, and, amid his curiosity, there’s a persistent return to the idea of gardens. Or: joy.”Īs he grapples with this definition, he revels in basic connections: our role in the nutrient cycle, the wash of food that nourishes our animal bodies, the wildernesses between us, and the hope that we might join them together. When Gay pauses to define delight in “Joy Is Such a Human Madness,” an essay after Zadie Smith’s of the same title, he gives a “false etymology: de-light suggests both ‘of light’ and ‘without light.’ And both of them concurrently is what I’m talking about. Wherever Gay finds his delight, he offers intimacy, rapport, and an open invitation to explore its many guises: joy, wonder, pleasure, sorrow, justice, revenge, anxiety, tenderness, caretaking, relief. Others stand like rocks in a stream, bearing an enduring, almost obstinate, witness.

Some of Gay’s delights beckon and invite, their doors thrown open in celebration. These smaller delights, tossed off on the way to somewhere else, serve as unobtrusive reminders of delight’s many textures and the fact that, although omnipresent, delight isn’t universal. His delights are wide-ranging and unrestrained, the greater of them often interrupted by smaller ones in a chain of digressions. In Gay’s ecumenical view, delight is found in the poignant and the loving, the light and the shadows, and the intentional process of tuning in to all the places-expected and unexpected-where it may reside. One of the shorter essays, “Lily on the Pants,” is prayer, hymn, sermon, and benediction, all in one go. It’s filled to the brim with spirit and the temporal allegiance with dailiness that abides at the root of mortality and spiritual practice alike. It’s hard not to reach for religious language when describing Gay’s work. WRIGHT once wrote it was her “confirmed bias that poets remain the most ‘stunned by existence,’ the most determined to redeem the world in words.” In The Book of Delights, a yearlong experiment in cultivating delight through daily essays, poet and writer Ross Gay beckons readers to linger with the beauty of the world and his belief in the human desire to conspire in that beauty by reorienting the quotidian to joy’s robust configurations.

The book of delights by ross gay