The subjects of the essays prove this belief. The goal of the book was “more like the development of a delight muscle” for him, a practice that “implies that the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study” (xii). His voice throughout demands that these essays be read with the same patience and willingness to follow joy where it leads with which he wrote them. Here, Gay’s inefficient style emphasizes the delight he takes in inefficiency itself. In an entry about delighting in inefficiency, he writes, in part, “I come from people for whom–as I write this, lounging, sipping coffee, listening to the oatmeal talking in the pot–inefficiency was not, mostly, an option” (5).

The tangential thoughts and images that lend surprise and higher meaning to Gay’s poems like “ode to buttoning and unbuttoning my shirt” can be risky in prose, as they can feel distracted rather than intentional, but Gay deploys them gratifyingly at times. Readers of Gay’s poetry will notice many of the same themes and strategies he uses in poems deployed in these essays.

Each one earns their diminutive title of essayette, as the longest is eight small pages and the shortest is three sentences. In a relatable move, Gay confesses in his prologue that he skipped some days, and the book actually only includes 102 entries. He set rules for himself of drafting them quickly and writing them by hand.

The book was a challenge Gay posed to himself to write an essay about something delightful daily for a year, starting and ending on his birthday. It is Gay’s first nonfiction book but is equally committed to relishing the natural world, friends and family, and pleasant strangers as Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude and his other poetry books. The title of award-winning American poet Ross Gay’s new book The Book of Delights contains its own review: delightful.

The Book of Delights by Ross Gay