Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude
Gay's third collection is a sustained act of the thing the title promises: a gratitude so thorough it includes grief, hardship, and loss within its embrace. The title poem is a 22-page meditation on a fig tree and everything attached to it. National Book Award finalist, Pulitzer finalist. Gay is the poet who has most completely made joy a serious literary subject. Not easy joy, not ignorant joy, but joy that knows what it costs and chooses itself anyway.
Gay's mode is the breathless run-on, sentences cartwheeling for pages, exclamations, asides to the reader, and you either board that bus or stand there watching it go. Line breaks often feel like pauses for breath rather than decisions. Sustained over a hundred pages, gratitude this insistent starts to feel like a hand gripping your shoulder a little too long.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
