Name: Madison Storm's review of Be Holding by Ross Gay
Item: Be Holding
Rating: 5
Author: Madison Storm

Ross Gay

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. 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.

A Poem

Be Holding

Madison Storm

oh my god!!! this opens up new worlds for me. ross gay did such a delightful work in using ekphrasis to describe sports lore/black history & lineages in sports, as well as using sports as ekphrasis! gonna try out sports as ekhprasis in my poetry

personal copy, bought from greenlight books

Patricia K

oh my god!!! this opens up new worlds for me. ross gay did such a delightful work in using ekphrasis to describe sports lore/black history & lineages in sports, as well as using sports as ekphrasis! gonna try out sports as ekhprasis in my poetry

personal copy, bought from greenlight books

Madison Storm &
Be Holding by Ross Gay

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Madison Storm &Be Holding by Ross Gay

Reviews

Join the club

Madison Storm &
Be Holding by Ross Gay