Be Holding - (Pitt Poetry) by Ross Gay (Paperback)

About the Book

A New Poem from the Author of The Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude and The Book of Delights

Book Synopsis

Winner, 2021 PEN/Jean Stein Award Winner, 2021 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry Winner, 2022 Indiana Author Award in Poetry

Be Holding is a love song to legendary basketball player Julius Erving--known as Dr. J--who dominated courts in the 1970s and '80s as a small forward for the Philadelphia '76ers, as well as over his career in both the NBA and ABA. But this book-length poem is more than just an ode to a magnificent athlete. 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 pick-up 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. Be Holding wonders how the imagination, or how our looking, might make us, or bring us, closer to each other. How our looking might make us reach for each other. And might make us be reaching for each other. And how that reaching might be something like joy.

Review Quotes

The brilliant fourth book from Gay, his first since winning the National Book Critics Circle Award with 2015's Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, continues his now-signature inquiry into feeling. Shaped as a single poem in a long sentence of center-justified couplets, the drama of this unfolding sentence is impeccable, a suspension that mirrors its subject: basketball Hall-of-Famer Julius Erving's midair "baseline scoop" in the 1980 NBA finals.... This extraordinary book offers an unforgettable flight from the conventional boundaries of the sentence.-- "Publishers Weekly, Starred Review"

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

Be Holding is as beguiling as it is urgent, equal parts agonizing and ecstatic. It is a critical work of reckoning for this fraught moment in which many of us are wondering how we might move forward despite the devastation we have wrought, both in our particular American context, and in our world as a whole.-- "Literary Hub"

Be Holding is an unabashedly ambitious work with a voracious, yet tender gaze.-- "Baltimore Art"

A unique work of form and substance.-- "The Millions"

Gay's poem theorizes an ethics that is inescapably political, and its ebullient gratitude, fore and aft, reads not just as an overflow of thankfulness but as a concrete practice of the ethics Gay suggests. It is the kind of practice that eschews literary competition and anxieties of influence; it is the kind of practice that, in contrast to a death-dealing drive to possess, gives and receives gifts--books, saplings, time, poetic lines--with open hands.-- "Ploughshares"

Impossible, unprecedented, right-before-your eyes but defying logic and the laws of nature.-- "RHINO"

In turning an instance of athletic prowess and grace into an expansive metaphoric vision, Gay pulls off a syntactical tour de force.-- "Kenyon Review"

It's a beautiful, moving account of love, triumph against the odds and how we might better reach out to each other.-- "People.com"

Ross Gay's work is not only celebratory. It is also an exegesis on loss, grief, prejudice, shame, and the improbability of grace in our lives--especially in Black lives.-- "Boston Review"

About the Author

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.