If the subject matter of his books is any indication, poet Ross Gay has a single-minded focus: making the world a better place. Following on his bestselling 2019 collection, The Book of Delights, Gay returns with Inciting Joy: Essays, a collection of 14 energetic reflections that investigate how to "make joy more available to us" and "how joy makes us act and feel."
In the service of this goal, Inciting Joy surveys an assortment of topics drawn from Gay's own experience that display his gift for intensely observing the world around him. They include his involvement in the creation of a community orchard in his hometown of Bloomington, Ind., and his appreciation for the standup comedy of Richard Pryor.
But the volume isn't a catalog of unalloyed pleasure. In "Through My Tears I Saw (Death: The Second Incitement)," Gay recounts the death of his father, a man with whom he had a difficult relationship, from liver cancer at age 58. He returns briefly to that event in the collection's penultimate and longest piece, "Grief Suite (Falling Apart: The Thirteenth Incitement)," a wide-ranging survey of male emotions and his own struggle with mental health issues.
Gay doesn't limit himself to purely personal concerns. A professor of English at Indiana University, he takes the educational system to task in "Dispatch from the Ruins (School: The Eleventh Incitement)," criticizing it for its emphasis on "outcomes," and above all for what he calls "the unstated outcome of our classes, and of school: At the end of this class you will be a better unit, more able to follow your leader." He offers as an alternative some of the innovative techniques he employs with his students in the service of his goal: "we might instead make something beautiful."
Despite its thematic relationship to its predecessor, in his current book, Gay makes a significant stylistic departure. In contrast to The Book of Delights' bite-sized entries he called "essayettes," written over the course of a single year, he's stretched out here into full-length essays that showcase the breadth of his interests and the vibrancy of his prose. Gay has an affinity for sentences that twist like winding country roads, stitched together with a profusion of commas and semicolons. He's especially fond of lists, like the 20 components of the "skateable world"--from fire hydrants to drainage ditches--he catalogues in "Share Your Bucket! (Skateboarding: The Fifth Incitement)," an exuberant ode one of his youthful passions.
Gay concludes Inciting Joy with an essay on gratitude, describing Aretha Franklin's rendition of "Amazing Grace," in a documentary of the making of her record of the same name. One can almost hear the ecstatic voices of a gospel choir in Gay's admonition that "we belong not to an institution or a party or a state or a market, but to each other. Needfully so." It's a fitting ending to a consistently uplifting book. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer
Shelf Talker: This lively set of 14 essays from a talented poet considers how to bring more joy to our lives.