The Unlikeliest of Heroes: Review of Ross Gay’s Inciting Joy
In his new collection of essays, Ross Gay shows us time and time again how community is formed in our lives. How one good recipe for lentil soup or homemade bagels can branch out until you look around and realize everyone in a three block radius of you is your family. This book is like that bagel recipe. It demands to be shared, to be passed around- it turns each reader into a domino for joy, falling until we knock our way through all human beings. I fall, then you fall, and the next falls, until we are all falling together: “this falling together, it is called, this holding each other through the falling, I am pretty sure of this, one of the names anyway: joy.”
This collection comes after his award-winning 2015 poetry collection A Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award,  2019’s essay collection The Book of Delights, and 2020’s love song to Julius Erving, Be Holding. Gratitude, delight, appreciation, and now, Gay is tackling joy- a difficult thing to do, some think, in our contemporary world of disparaging politics and environmental disasters. In Inciting Joy, joy is a fundamental human right. And Gay is angry at the things in the world that challenge that. But, as he shouts from the pages of this collection, nothing can stop joy from existing. Joy always has a seat at the table and, as Gay puts it, is often inextricable from sorrow: 
“What if joy is not only entangled with pain, or suffering, or sorrow, but is also what emerges from how we care for each other through those things?”
I have to be honest, I think about this book every single day. Yesterday, I saw two boys playing basketball in the park- instantly, my mind went to The Ninth Incitement, in which Gay shares how pickup basketball creates a world unto itself, a special place where to belong, all you have to do is dribble. Even if nothing particularly joyful happens, I still think, I have to “thank the trillion or so microbes in your gut and creepy-crawling your skin…some of whom if they get ill and die off you will be a goner in a heartbeat.” Joy went from an occasional fleeting feeling, when I bothered to notice it, to an activity that now takes up most of my day. I’ll be grateful for that change forever. 
Ross Gay is, at his core, a poet and a music lover. This collection makes that abundantly clear. Gay’s writing has a vivid musicality. His sentences are rife with commas, em-dashes, semicolons, and parentheticals. Some of his footnotes are multiple pages long. He interrupts himself, gets himself on long tangents, and corrects himself. Reading this collection is like conversing with someone so eager to talk, they’re tripping over their own words, they can’t get them out fast enough. It’s easy to let this unique style turn you off. What’s more, as rambling as he can be, he can be equally esoteric. I especially felt this way during The Tenth Incitement, wherein Gay recounts the joy of hearing musical artists covering songs and making them their own. At a modest estimate, I understood about 5% of the references he made in that chapter alone. I would implore any prospective reader I may have just dissuaded to consider that not everything is meant for everybody. The beauty of all the essays in this collection, including the ones that left me in their dust, are the emotions that propel them. It’s a beautiful thing to be in proximity of the joy that radiates from Gay discussing what he loves, and it’s inspiring: it made me want to love things with that level of intensity, made me appreciate the things in my life that I do love that much. 
Though it may be a lofty goal, I would recommend this book to everyone, but especially those who are particularly vulnerable to the pain and sorrow of life. May this book be a salve for you as it was for me. Ross Gay shows his readers how to prioritize joy, yet he doesn’t shy away from rage, or pity, self-doubt, sorrow, or indignation. In the midst of chaos, the most unlikeliest of heroes emerges, say it with me: joy. I will finish with a final quote, to further whet your whistle:
“The luminous, mycelial tethers between us, our fundamental connection to one another, the raft through the sorrow, the holding through the grief joy is, reminds us, again and again, that we belong not to an institution or a party or a state or a market, but to each other. Needfully so.”
-Abby Edgecumbe