Books written by
The poet who turned paying close attention into a daily practice of gratitude — and made it a bestseller
Ross Gay spent a decade building a reputation as one of American poetry’s most awarded voices — Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a National Book Award finalist — before an entirely different kind of book made him widely known outside poetry circles. On his forty-second birthday, he started writing one short essay a day about something that delighted him. A year later, that project became The Book of Delights, a New York Times bestseller that turned “paying attention to what’s good” into something like a literary movement.
Below is his major bibliography in order, with my honest take on each one, a quick-facts box, a recorded conversation about The Book of Delights, and an FAQ. His books pair naturally with my Best Poetry Books reading list.
Sources: Wikipedia, rossgay.net, and contemporary reporting cited throughout. Last updated August 2026.
“Joy is the justice we give ourselves.”
— Ross Gay, in The Book of Delights (2019)
Watch: Ross Gay on The Book of Delights
Recorded at the 2019 AWP Book Fair, shortly after The Book of Delights was published — Gay discusses the year-long daily writing practice that became the book.
Quick facts
Against Which
Gay’s first collection, written in his early thirties, already carries the two impulses that would define his career: unguarded tenderness and a refusal to look away from grief, violence, and race in America. The poems move between elegy and celebration often within the same stanza.
Rougher and more overtly political than his later, more meditative work — useful for seeing where the gratitude-and-delight project of his mid-career books actually started, and what it was reacting against.
Bringing the Shovel Down
Gay’s second collection turns toward labor, the body, and American violence with a harder, more urgent register than his debut, digging — literally and figuratively — into what it costs to keep living inside a country this contradictory.
His angriest, most unflinching book. Read it if you only know the later “delight” work and want to see the fuller range underneath it.
Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude
Gay’s breakthrough collection, built around orchards, fruit trees, friendship, and grief for his father, written in long, breathless, run-on lines that read almost like spoken prayer. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award.
This is the book that established him as a major American poet, and it’s the clearest expression of the gratitude-as-practice-not-denial idea that runs through everything he’s written since. Essential.
Be Holding
A single book-length poem built around one moment of Julius Erving’s 1980 NBA Finals “impossible” layup, spiraling outward from that instant into meditations on Black life, basketball, the body, and being witnessed. Won the PEN America Jean Stein Book Award.
His most formally ambitious book by far — a single sustained poem rather than a collection. Not the place to start, but arguably his most virtuosic writing once you know his shorter work.
The Book of Delights
Starting on his forty-second birthday, Gay committed to writing one short essay a day for a year about something that delighted him — fireflies, high-fives, a friend’s garden, the particular pleasure of a stranger’s kindness. The result became a New York Times bestseller and introduced his prose voice to a far wider audience than his poetry alone had reached.
This is the one to start with. It’s short, funny, generous, and the easiest entry point into everything else he’s written — delight here is treated as a discipline, not a mood, which is the key to reading the rest of his work.
Inciting Joy
A collection of longer essays arguing that real joy isn’t the opposite of sorrow but something made alongside it — through gardening, pickup basketball, skateboarding, grief, and community. More sustained and structurally ambitious than the Delights books.
Read this once The Book of Delights has hooked you and you want the fuller argument behind it: joy as something built collectively, not stumbled into alone.
The Book of (More) Delights
A second year of daily delight-essays, written a few years after the first and shaped by everything in between — a pandemic, more grief, more gratitude. Slightly more reflective than the original, aware of its own project this time around.
A worthy sequel rather than a repeat — read it after the first Book of Delights, once you already trust what he’s doing with the form.
Ross Gay’s Recurring Subject: Gratitude That Doesn’t Look Away
Gay’s poems and essays return again and again to a single argument: that delight and gratitude are not naive, and they are not the opposite of grief — they’re a discipline you practice inside grief, not instead of it. Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude was written while he was mourning his father and tending a fruit orchard at the same time; The Book of Delights turns a daily attention practice into short essays that hold racism, aging, and loss right alongside fireflies and high-fives, often in the same paragraph. Nothing in his work asks you to look away from what’s hard. It asks you to notice what’s good without letting that noticing replace the hard part.
Stylistically, his poetry favors long, breathless, run-on sentences and lines that spill past where you expect them to stop — a form that mimics the accumulating, associative way gratitude actually works in a person’s head. His prose in the Delights books is looser and funnier, built from short essayettes that can turn from a joke to a gut-punch in a sentence. Be Holding, his most formally ambitious book, takes the opposite approach: a single unbroken poem, sustained across an entire book, built around one three-second basketball highlight. Across every format, the throughline is the same — sustained, unhurried attention to something ordinary until it turns out to be enormous.
Frequently asked questions
Who is Ross Gay?
Ross Gay is an American poet and essayist, born in 1974, best known for the poetry collection Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (2015) and the New York Times bestselling essay collection The Book of Delights (2019). He teaches poetry at Indiana University Bloomington.
What is Ross Gay’s most famous book?
The Book of Delights (2019) is his most widely read book and a New York Times bestseller, built from a year of daily short essays about ordinary moments of delight. Among his poetry, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (2015) is his best known and most awarded collection.
What order should I read Ross Gay’s books in?
If you want his most accessible work first, start with The Book of Delights, then Inciting Joy, then The Book of (More) Delights. For his poetry, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude is the strongest entry point, followed by Be Holding once you’re used to his voice; Against Which and Bringing the Shovel Down show where he started.
How many books has Ross Gay written?
Ross Gay has published seven books: four poetry collections — Against Which (2006), Bringing the Shovel Down (2011), Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (2015), and Be Holding (2020) — and three essay collections — The Book of Delights (2019), Inciting Joy (2022), and The Book of (More) Delights (2023).
What awards has Ross Gay won?
Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Be Holding won the PEN America Jean Stein Book Award. The Book of Delights was a New York Times bestseller.
Is The Book of Delights poetry or prose?
Prose. It’s a collection of short lyric essays — often just a paragraph or two each — rather than poems, though Gay’s background as a poet shapes the rhythm and compression of the writing throughout.
What is Ross Gay’s writing style?
Gay writes in long, associative, often run-on sentences that mimic the way gratitude and attention actually accumulate in a person’s thinking. His poetry tends toward sustained, unbroken lines; his essays are shorter and more conversational, but share the same instinct to hold joy and grief in the same sentence rather than separating them.
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From the bookshelf
“Joy is the justice we give ourselves.”
— Ross Gay, in The Book of Delights (2019)
Written by Lisanne Swart
Lisanne curates books for curious readers at lisanneswart.com, publishing original reading lists, author deep-dives, and honest recommendations since 2021. Read more about Lisanne.
