Be Holding

Reviews / Votes

The brilliant fourth book from Gay, his first since winning the National Book Critics Circle Award with 2015's Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, continues his now-signature inquiry into feeling. Shaped as a single poem in a long sentence of center-justified couplets, the drama of this unfolding sentence is impeccable, a suspension that mirrors its subject: basketball Hall-of-Famer Julius Erving's midair "baseline scoop" in the 1980 NBA finals.... This extraordinary book offers an unforgettable flight from the conventional boundaries of the sentence. * Publishers Weekly, Starred Review * Ross Gay's work is not only celebratory. It is also an exegesis on loss, grief, prejudice, shame, and the improbability of grace in our lives-especially in Black lives. * Boston Review * A unique work of form and substance. * The Millions * Impossible, unprecedented, right-before-your eyes but defying logic and the laws of nature. * RHINO * In turning an instance of athletic prowess and grace into an expansive metaphoric vision, Gay pulls off a syntactical tour de force. * Kenyon Review * Be Holding is an unabashedly ambitious work with a voracious, yet tender gaze. * Baltimore Art * Gay's poem theorizes an ethics that is inescapably political, and its ebullient gratitude, fore and aft, reads not just as an overflow of thankfulness but as a concrete practice of the ethics Gay suggests. It is the kind of practice that eschews literary competition and anxieties of influence; it is the kind of practice that, in contrast to a death-dealing drive to possess, gives and receives gifts-books, saplings, time, poetic lines-with open hands. * Ploughshares * Be Holding is as beguiling as it is urgent, equal parts agonizing and ecstatic. It is a critical work of reckoning for this fraught moment in which many of us are wondering how we might move forward despite the devastation we have wrought, both in our particular American context, and in our world as a whole. * Literary Hub * It's a beautiful, moving account of love, triumph against the odds and how we might better reach out to each other. * People.com * This book-length poem is a voice's drive down center court. 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. Ross Gay has once again proven himself one of our greatest poets. -- Claudia Rankine