Ross Gay and Adrian Matejka: The Book of (More) Delights

Until recently, Ross Gay was predominantly known as a highly decorated and accomplished poet whose accolades included a National Book Critics Circle Award and National Book Award finalist distinction. With his first prose title, the bestselling The Book of Delights, he struck a collective chord in short essays that celebrated the often unexamined but profound pleasures of daily life, even amid the enormous challenges of our contemporary world.
Adept at making a bounty out of the everyday, Gay again gives voice to the human desire for joy with The Book of (More) Delights, a timely reminder that delight exists all around us, if we take the time to look for it. And even as he acknowledges racism, consumerism, climate change, and individual pain-the forces that endanger joy-he shows us that our shared sorrow can bring us together. These new essays, also written over the course of a year, are resonant and linguistically exquisite―required reading for anyone who has ever had a bad day. Which is to say, all of us.
Yet as much as these joyous essays proclaim yes; they at times declare no-because for Gay, practicing delight can also be an act of defiance in a broken world. “We’ve been mandated, over the past several years, to be suspicious of one another,” Gay writes. “To regard each other as potential vectors of doom. These essays refuse that, and refuse those who would convince us to do so, by wondering instead, and sometimes militantly, what if we regarded each other as potential vectors of delight?”
Mr. Gay will be in conversation with Adrian Matejka, an award-winning poet and editor of Poetry magazine. His poetry collections include The Devil’s Garden, Mixology, The Big Smoke, Map to the Stars, and Somebody Else Sold the World. Matejka’s other honors are the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana Authors Award, the Julia Peterkin Award, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and a Simon Fellowship from United States Artists. He served as Poet Laureate of the state of Indiana in 2018-19.