Today’s GalleyCrush is Ross Gay’s Be Holding, forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press on September 8, 2020.
Perfect pitch: “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 pickup 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.”
First lines: “You might have noticed there’s nowhere to go, / the wind cutting little eddies // at your collarbones / and behind your ear.”
Big blurb: “This book-length poem is a voice’s drive down center court. At once record, collage, group photograph, dance, and archive, Be Holding reveals a multifaceted intimacy and lyricism within the history of a game, tracing how this history is interconnected with the saga of our country. Ross Gay has once again proven himself one of our greatest poets.” —Claudia Rankine
Book notes: Paperback, poetry, 80 pages.
Author bio: Ross Gay teaches poetry at Indiana University and is the author of the poetry collections Against Which, Bringing the Shovel Down, Lace and Pyrite: Letters From Two Gardens (with Aimee Nezhukumatathil), River (with Rose Wehrenberg), Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, and the essay collection The Book of Delights.
