Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude
Gay's third collection is a sustained act of the thing the title promises: a gratitude so thorough it includes grief, hardship, and loss within its embrace. The title poem is a 22-page meditation on a fig tree and everything attached to it. National Book Award finalist, Pulitzer finalist. Gay is the poet who has most completely made joy a serious literary subject. Not easy joy, not ignorant joy, but joy that knows what it costs and chooses itself anyway.
The near-absence of punctuation draws the sharpest complaints; one reader says flatly, “there weren't enough punctuation breaks, so the lines ran into each other,” and rhythm blurs across page after page. Another calls specific pieces “strange and extremely disjointed,” with the connective logic hard to follow inside a single poem. A critic even concedes the poems “wander, and wallow, and address themselves.” Some readers admire individual sentences while feeling no attachment to the poems as wholes, one writing that the sentences read beautifully but did nothing more for her. Others call the longer pieces “many meandering poems that take you on a journey,” taking too long to reach their point. The book leans heavily on death and loss, and a few readers find that grief-adjacent material starts to feel interchangeable across twenty-four poems.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
