Episode 25: Ross Gay
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Rachel Zucker speaks with poet, teacher, gardner and community organizer Ross Gay. Gay is the author of Bringing Down the Shovel, Against Which, River, and Catlog of Unabashed Gratitude which won the Kinglsey Tufts Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award.
Zucker and Gay talk about gardens, seasonal changes, teenage boys, anger, sorrow, stress reduction, and how poems can help you look at difficult emotions. Gay reads from his book Catlog and one of his new, unpublished “delights”.
Gay and Zucker talk about what they love about long poems and the experience of writing and reading them and other prosy-poemy forms of sustained meditations. They discuss a mutual love for prose by poets and how to teach less from the mode of critique and more from gratitude and love.
Books by Ross Gay
Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (Pitt Poetry Series, 2015)
Bringing the Shovel Down (Pitt Poetry Series, 2011)
Against Which (Cavankerry, 2006)
Lace & Pyrite (with Aimee Nezhukumatathil) (Organic Weapon Arts Chapbook Series, 2011)
Books and Other Authors Mentioned in the Episode
Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born (W.W. Norton, 1995)
Sarah Manguso’s prose:
300 Arguments: Essays (Graywolf, 2017)
Ongoingness: The End of a Diary (Graywolf, 2015)
The Guardians: An Elegy for a Friend (Picador, 2013)
The Two Kinds of Decay (Picador, 2009)
Rachel Zucker’s Mothers (Counterpath, 2013)
Maggie Nelson’s prose:
The Red Parts (Graywolf, 2016)
The Argonauts (Graywolf, 2016)
The Art of Cruelty (W.W. Norton, 2012)
Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (University of Iowa Press, 2011)
Claudia Rankine’s Citizen (Graywolf, 2014)
Other Relevant Links
“An Anatomy of the Long Poem,” by Rachel Zucker, published on the Academy of American Poets blog
