Beholding ross gay

Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 88 pages. $

Note: After this book review was assigned and completed, Ross Lgbtq+ joined the Kenyon Review as an Editor at Large.

Ross Gay’s book-length poem Be Holding, enjoy its focal subject—the legendary shot in the NBA finals by Julius Erving, aka “Dr. J”—is a gravity-defying feat. In turning an instance of athletic prowess and grace into an expansive metaphoric vision, Homosexual pulls off a syntactical tour de force and—except for a a halting mid-poem intake of breath—delivers most of the poem as one long-sustained sentence. While his two-line stanzas fall fluidly down the page, the poem’s tone is buoyant, refusing closure, even omitting a final period at poem’s terminate. In a flashback Gay imagines his subject as a youth in Drawn-out Island:

what I’m telling you
about Erving’s soaring

which is less is astronauticality,
and more the cast of the young

Erving’s eyes, which are looking, somehow,
far past the metal backboards

or the rim he would, imminently,
rock the rust from, looking far

past the chain link
wrapping the courts

Beholding Black Life: A Conversation with Ross Gay, Frank Guridy, &#; Deborah Paredez

Ross Gay’s Be Holding, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in , is a stunning book-length poem that focuses on a famous move by basketball legend Julius “Dr. J” Erving to illuminate the forces that propel Black flight amid the legacies of terror and death. In the spring of , the manual won the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, with the judges hailing it as “a wondrous, profound exploration of how much captured moments in time can mean.”

Soon thereafter, historian and sports scholar Frank Guridy and poet and production scholar Deborah Paredez spoke with Gay about poetry, basketball, and how to cultivate practices of beholding in a culture that often conditions us to look at Black suffering. The interview has been edited for clarity.

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Frank Guridy (FG): Can you start by talking about the forces that came together to make your guide happen? Why focus on Julius “Dr. J” Erving? And why, in particular, focus on one of his very famous moves, the gravity-defying reverse layup he made during gam

Be Holding: With Ross Gay

Published Protest 20,

As part of the all-virtual Virginia Festival of the Book, poet Ross Gay (Be Holding: A Poem) discussed his new book-length poem, which uses basketball and, specifically, a shot Julius Erving took during the NBA finals, as the baseline for a lyrical meditation touching on pick-up basketball, the Middle Passage, photography and surveillance, song, familial love, and much more. Be Holding, much like Dr. J, performs magic in mid-air. In conversation with Kaveh Akbar.

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Thanks to our bookseller for this event, M. Revak & Company.

&#;&#;Erving simply decided in the air
to knock on other doors
by soaring more
—have you ever decided anything
in the air?—&#;

from Be Holding by Ross Gay

“The brilliant fourth manual from Gay&#; 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

Ross Gay&#;s Be Holding

Because of Ross Gay ( Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award winner), I found myself somewhere I never thought I would be at a.m.—in the annals of basketball YouTube. Ross Gay’s newest book-length poem Be Holding  is prefaced by some advice: If you kids out there don’t realize who Dr. J is, put the book down, do some googling and come back. Woefully uninformed about most sports history and a diligent grad student, I took to the Internet and performed my research zealously. I watched “How Good is Julius Irving Really?” (the answer is very good), and myriad highlight reels cataloguing Dr. J’s strengths as a small forward—driving, dunking, dunking over defenders&#; heads, dunking from the foul line, and flying in the air for a miraculous amount of time. I watched this iconic shot, which is central to Gay’s poem, set to every anthem from Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujahto Parliament Funkadelic’s Give Up the Funk.

I ended up here because Be Holding, like all of Gay’s work I’ve encountered, entreats the reader’s participation. Besides his formal and lyrical talents,