Ross Gay

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER As Heard on NPR's This American Life 'The delights he extols here (music, laughter, generosity, poetry, lots of nature) are bulwarks against casual cruelties . . . contagious in their joy' New York Times The winner of the NBCC Award for Poetry offers up a spirited collection of short lyric essays, written daily over a tumultuous year, reminding us of the purpose and pleasure of praising, extolling, and celebrating ordinary wonders. Among Gay's funny, poetic, philosophical delights: a friend's unabashed use of air quotes, cradling a tomato seedling aboard an aeroplane, the silent nod of acknowledgement 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 other subject, 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. *** 'These charming, digressive "essayettes" surprise and challenge more than a reader might expect . . . 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.' New Yorker '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 '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

Essays on the small joys we overlook in our busy lives

The Book of Delights

Charlotte Weir 

My friend Pat told me about the village next to his mother's in the Philippines where, a few years back, a typhoon had leveled most of everything. Salvaged from the wreckage, stacked in the gazebo that had survived, were all the doors.

She is accepting, it seems, what she is: one of the varieties of light.

l suspect this statue-adorning impulse, whether or not we know who the public figure is. is evidence, more evidence, that our inclination, our nature, is to communicate the beautiful and the fragrant however we can. To make of the world a bouquet. Or a vase.

One of the many delights of a garden, I am finding, are the ways it encourages jenkiness.

Because in trying to articulate what, perhaps, joy has occurred to me that among other things-the trees and the mushrooms have shown me this-joy is the mostly invisible, the underground union between us, and me, which is, among other things, the great fact of our life and the lives of everyone and thing we love going away. If we sink a spoon into that fact, into the duff between us, we will find it teeming.

Today I am admiring the redbud, this most subtle and radiant of trees, which, like many of the most beautiful things, requires some training to see to really see

The point is that in almost every instance of our lives, our social lives, we are, if we pay attention, in the midst of an almost constant, if subtle, caretaking. Holding open doors. Offering elbows at crosswalks. Letting someone else go first. Helping with the heavy bags. Reaching what's too high, or what's been dropped. Pulling someone back to their feet. Stopping at the car wreck, at the struck dog. The alternating merge, also known as the zipper. This caretaking is our default mode and it's always a lie that convinces us to act or believe otherwise. Always.

The knowledge of which. the understanding of which, the inhabiting of which might be the beginning of a radical love. A renovatine love, even.

I'm also delighting in this accouterment fluffing around my neck because it represents a different relationship to an idea of masculinity I have inherited, and for much of my life watered, which makes it a garden.

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