Ross Gay

Ross Gay is the author of several poetry collections including Against Which, Bringing the Shovel Down, Lace & Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens (with Aimee Nezhukumatathil), River  (with Rose Wehrenberg), Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, and the essay collection The Book of Delights. Ross Gay’s Be Holding (University of Pittsburgh Press) is a love song to basketball player Julius Erving— the legendary Dr. J—who dominated courts in the 1970s and ‘80s as a small forward for the Philadelphia ‘76ers. But this book-length poem is more than just an ode to a magnificent athlete. 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 bring us closer to each other. Poet, essayist, and playwright Claudia Rankine called it “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.”