The Book

Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude
by Ross Gay

Through 24 lyric poems, Ross Gay's Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude offers a luminous exploration of death, life, and their many tides. Animated by what Gay has called the "discipline of gratitude," the collection considers sorrow's potential, grounded in the rhythms and abundance of the natural world: the compost that gives way to rich soil, the decay that reveals seeds, the branches that must be trimmed to make room for new growth. Mistakes can be landscapes of new possibilities, he seems to say. With warmth and gratitude and often humor, he roots his poems in deeply personal experiences while noting that impermanence is one of the threads that connect us: "we have this common experience—many common experiences, but a really foundational one is that we are not here forever" (On Being).

Though suffering and sorrow wend their way through each poem, adopting various guises, they are met everywhere by a commitment to this cycle of transformation. Gay sees the twinning of loss and abundance as an astonishing opportunity for tenderness and joy, and the poems in Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude are intimate, conversational. "I trust people who, in the same conversation, use more than one voice, more than one register. Maybe it speaks to a kind of urgency. But I think it might, more accurately, speak to a kind of intimacy," Gay told the Rumpus. Throughout the collection, Gay addresses his readers directly, as an old friend might, and invites them to observe the gentle, loving labor of bees; to taste sweet fruit-flesh; to smell sweet potato biscuits frying in coconut oil; to stay awhile and sip honeyed tea; to leave, warm and fed, when they are ready to go; to know they will be missed.

In an interview with the Poetry Foundation, Gay shared: "[The book] wants to be nuts-in-love…And that can feel really terrifying, that kind of real openness or attempt at openness—I'll speak for myself—that feels scary...." Love, in other words, is a sustained practice: care reified through the work of vulnerability. Delight and gratitude in the face of impending loss is a fearsome prospect, but Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude shows us, again and again, that it is precisely this kind of openness that allows for growth and joy. Open the self, Gay suggests—open the heart—and you open "huge windows through which light / Pours to wash clean and make a touch less awful // What forever otherwise will hurt" (p. 41).

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