Inciting Joy

In his latest collection, award-winning poet and bestselling author Ross Gay explores — in full-length, heavily footnoted essays that eddy conversationally around their topics — the complex, cathartic, and unifying thing that is joy. Whether you’re seeking it or seeking to better understand it, Inciting Joy delivers. Recommended By Tove H., Powells.com

An intimate and electrifying collection of essays from the New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Delights

In these thirteen essays, prize-winning poet and author Ross Gay considers the joy we incite when we care for each other, especially through life's inevitable hardships. Throughout Inciting Joy, he explores how we can practice recognizing that connection, and also, crucially, how we grow it.

In "We Kin" he thinks about the garden (especially around August, when the zucchini and tomatoes come on) as a laboratory of mutual aid; in "Share Your Bucket" he explores skateboarding's reclamation of public space; he considers the costs of masculinity in "Grief Suite"; and in "Through My Tears I Saw," he recognizes what was healed in caring for his father as he was dying.

In an era in which what divides us garners so much attention, Inciting Joy offers a vital alternative: What might be possible if we turn our attention to what brings us together, to what we love? Full of energy, curiosity, and compassion, Inciting Joy is essential reading from one of our most brilliant writers.

"Stunning....Gay's curiosity is present on every page and his precise yet playful prose sparkles….This resonant, vivid meditation shouldn't be missed." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

"Inciting Joy is a book that will break your heart. Ross Gay will break your heart. He will break it and advocate for breaking it over and over. Why? So we can choose our life, our survival, our full humanity. Inciting Joy is brilliant because it's not just a book; it's proof that the way we carve out room for joy is by acknowledging our constant teacher: sorrow." Ada Limón , author of The Hurting Kind: Poems

"Ross Gay is as insightful and lyrical as an essayist as he is as a poet. His essays are as trenchant as they are moving, finding in the minutiae of life the grand themes of human existence." Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winner and author of War is Force that Gives us Meaning and America: The Farewell Tour

"This is instantly one of my favorite books ever. A wondering-aloud to which I will be returning often, and a brilliant manifesto making a case for joy as a thing which is as complex and rigorous as it is lovely and free. In that sneaky way Ross Gay has of lovingly disarming you before getting you to dwell in rooms of your heart you'd left vacant, Inciting Joy uses its titular emotion as a window into sorrow and rage, into gifts and loss, into the tricky business of being alive." Eve L. Ewing, author of Ghosts in The Schoolyard, Electric Arches, and Marvel Comic's Ironheart series

"Ross Gay's work throws off so much light, I've often wondered if it was powered by a superior energy source. He has done something new and beautiful with Inciting Joy. He has sunk a bioluminescent depth-charge into our time, one which peers into the whole sea of experience around us: revealing it full of connection, mystery and a longing for relief." John Freeman, founder of Freeman's literary magazine and (most recently) editor of The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story

"In this masterful, raw, and stirring collection of essays, Ross Gay has once again coaxed his readers to awaken to our full humanity. Inciting Joy will make you gasp in wonderment as your truest truths are laid bare, and you will go back and reread the lines over and over, whispering, 'This, yes, this!'" Leah Penniman, co-founder of Soul Fire Farm and author of Farming While Black

Ross Gay is the New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Delights: Essays and four books of poetry. His Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude won the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award; and Be Holding won the 2021 PEN America Jean Stein Book Award. He is a founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a non-profit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy project. Gay has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He teaches at Indiana University.