PITTSBURGH—The University of Pittsburgh Press is proud to announce that its author Ross Gay is among five finalists for the National Book Award in the poetry category for his collection Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. The winner, who will receive $10,000, will be announced on November 18.
Gay described his third collection as a sustained meditation on that which goes away—loved ones, the seasons, the earth as we know it. “This is a book that studies the wisdom of the garden and orchard,” he said, “those places where all—death, sorrow, loss—is converted into what might, with patience, nourish us.”ALA Booklist had this praise for the book: “These are accessible, alive poems that give one the sense of sitting and talking in the poet’s kitchen. Often vulnerable and self-conscious in tone, they dig deep in the dirt of memory and unearth powerful images.”
According to the American Poetry Review, “I’m bowled over by how Ross Gay reaches again and again toward stating what’s beautiful, what’s sweet, what’s most emotionally moving to him: he is genuinely ‘unabashed.’ He is definitely interested in the sentimental, but the poems don’t feel remotely treacly to me. They feel bold and wild and weird.”
Gay is assistant professor of English at Indiana University and the author of two other collections: Against Which and Bringing the Shovel Down. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Atlanta Review, Harvard Review, Gulf Coast, and Ploughshares, among other publications.
Gay also teaches in the low-residency MFA program at New England College and is a Cave Canem Fellow.
Here is a link to the book’s web page:https://www.upress.pitt.edu/BookDetails.aspx?bookId=36564
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