“Ross Gay offers up a muscled poetry of a thousand surprises, giving us a powerful collection that fireworks even the bleakest nights with ardency and grace. His poetry consists of beautiful metaphors and startling images.' His poems are fast-paced, carefully crafted with great attention to detail of those he writes about and the images that surround him. 'Ross Gay is a fresh voice in American poetry. 'I'm bowled over by how Ross Gay reaches again and again toward stating what's beautiful, what's sweet, what's most emotionally moving to him: he is genuinely 'unabashed.' He is definitely interested in the sentimental, but the poems don't feel remotely treacly to me.

He looks to the act of writing as real alchemy, and death, disappointment, and inequity become honey in his hands.” “Almost no one has the faith Gay seems to have in poetry's ability to tap grace from the happenings of his life.

Tess Taylor, NPR, All Things Considered Gay even thanks you for reading it, saying I can't stop my gratitude, which includes dear reader, you for staying here with me, for moving your lips just so as I speak.' Whether you're feeling like you have a whole brass band of gratitude or if you're feeling like you only have a rusty horn, read this book. Gay's praise is Whitmanesque, full of manure, mulberry-stained purple bird poop, dirty clothes and hangovers, but also the pleasure of bare feet, of pruning a peach tree, of feeding a neighbor. Gay's poems burst forth in leggy, unexpected ways, zooming in on legs furred with pollen or soil breast-stroking into the xylem. 'Like one big celebration bursting with joy. In ‘Burial,’ the speaker adds his father's ashes to the soil while planting a plum tree, and he sees his mother as a bison, dragging ‘her hooves through the ash / of her heart,’ in ‘c'mon!’ Whether by contemplating the extraordinary within everyday acts (sleeping in clothes, drinking water, buttoning and unbuttoning a shirt), or by entwining past and present as he pays homage to parents, friends, even his former love, Gay embraces the natural cycles of life and death as only an introspective gardener and accomplished poet can.” Often vulnerable and self-conscious in tone, they dig deep in the dirt of memory and unearth powerful images. These are accessible, alive poems that give one the sense of sitting and talking in the poet's kitchen.

“The Bloomington Community Orchard must have spread its roots into Ross Gay, an Indiana University English professor, as the organic poems in his third collection bear fruit, line by line, with each fresh word or phrase. St Joseph's University (Brooklyn Voices Series).

Catalog of unabashed gratitude poem