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The Book of Delights: Essays
Thoughtful, poetic, and powerful. Much like keeping a daily gratitude journal, poet Ross Gay wrote slice of life essays every day for an entire year. Nothing is too small or insignificant to cause delight, from candy wrappers to nicknames, to basketball—and this unique format reveals just as much as a tell-all memoir. Please note that while this book is packed with delights there are also some tough moments and hard themes. He reminds us to find delight in the every day, even in spite of life’s injustices and difficulties that so often come our way.
About the Book
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
As Heard on NPR’s This American Life
“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 lyric 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 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.
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