Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude: A Manual of Argentine Fictions (Pitt Poetry Series)

Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, Ross Gay (University of Pittsburg, PA: 2015), 102 pp.I know I have several friends who listen to On Being on public radio every Sunday morning. For many of us, those interviews are "church."So a couple of weeks ago, Krista Tippett interviewed Ross Gay, an urban activist whose beliefs and service to the community are focussed around community gardens. He's also a poet.Here's where I recommend his work to both On Being fans and my fellow poets. Ross is a master of the ecstatic, exuberant poem. I know many poets who attempt this form of expression but miss because the poem is coming from a much too self-conscious place. The trick is being in absolute command of the elements of the poetic craft and then sweeping them from the table, getting everything out of the way of the poem itself. (Revision comes later, of course.)And that's why I'm here to praise the poems in this book. I've never read better in English. This is amazing work. Treat yourself. If you've watched a flock of millions of birds in the sunset, or sat in awe as witness of dervishes twirling between heaven and earth, or been overcome at a symphony performance where everyone on stage is giving their all to their part and it boils up and out of the top of your head in one ecstatic geyser...you have experienced what is going on in the poet's language here.

Devour this book of poems. They are alive, filled with joy and sensual pleasure. Thank you, Ross Gay, for this collection!

Beyond.

Ross Gay is an original and profound poet who finds the sheer beauty in ordinary things and seemingly ordinary people. Read aloud, it is even better. I have a group of friends, a rotating cast of characters, who get together in own yard to read poetry together, some of it their own, but most of it favorites that people have found. It seems like a different person each time brings Ross Gay's Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude, and usually picks a different poem to read, and they are all gems. A poet of real genius.

I have a large collection of contemporary poetry, but this is an entirely new voice, and a new perspective where there are many themes in pone poem, giving both macro and micro views, and then suddenly, at the end, you realize the tenderness of life embedded in the heat of each poem. These are more than "humanistic" poems. These are true poems of living life, not just observing it.