Ross Gay is the author three books of poetry: Against Which, Bringing the Shovel Down, and, most recently, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. The following book review concerns Ross Gay’s latest collection, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (University of Pittsburgh Press, February 2015). By Claire Schwartz   Listen to me. I am telling you a true thing. This is the only kingdom. The kingdom of touching; The touches of disappearing, things. –Aracelis Girmay, ‘Elegy’     There are no elegies in Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. There are, of course, odes: “Ode to Buttoning and Unbuttoning My Shirt,” “Ode to the Flute,” “Ode to Sleeping in My Clothes,” “Ode to Drinking Water from My Hands”—not to mention the other poems not bearing the label, but nonetheless awash with gratitude. Crocuses and bees and bagpipes and ‘the quick and gentle flocking / of men to the old lady falling down’ are sanctified by the brush and burrow of thankfulness. As their titles make clear, Gay’s odes dwell in the ordinary, but in the poems’ vast ecologies, the quotidian surges toward the cosmological. The act of buttoning and unbuttoning a shirt gives rise to a meditation on the hand’s other gentlest pursuits:... Read More