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Be Holding

A Poem

Contributors

By Ross Gay

Read by Ross Gay

Formats and Prices

Price

$14.99

Format

Audiobook Download (Unabridged)

Format:

Audiobook Download (Unabridged) $14.99

Winner, 2021 PEN/Jean Stein Award
Winner, 2021 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry
Winner, 2022 Indiana Author Award in Poetry

Be Holding is a love song to legendary basketball player Julius Erving—known as Dr. J—who dominated courts in the 1970s and ‘80s as a small forward for the Philadelphia ‘76ers. But this book-length poem is more than just an ode to a magnificent athlete. Through a kind of lyric research, or lyric meditation, Ross Gay connects Dr. J’s famously impossible move from the 1980 NBA Finals against the Los Angeles Lakers to pick-up basketball and the flying Igbo and the Middle Passage, to photography and surveillance and state violence, to music and personal histories of flight and familial love. Be Holding wonders how the imagination, or how our looking, might make us, or bring us, closer to each other. How our looking might make us reach for each other. And might make us be reaching for each other. And how that reaching might be something like joy.

On Sale
Oct 8, 2024
Publisher
Hachette Audio
ISBN-13
9781668644874

Ross Gay

About the Author

Ross Gay is the New York Times bestselling author of the essay collections The Book of Delights and Inciting Joy and four books of poetry. His Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award; and Be Holding won the 2021 PEN America Jean Stein Book Award. Gay is a founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a non-profit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy project and has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He teaches at Indiana University.

Noah Davis grew up in Tipton, Pennsylvania, and writes about the Allegheny Front. His poems and prose have appeared in Best New Poets, Orion Magazine, North American Review, River Teeth Journal, Sou’wester, and Chautauqua, among others. His first collection of poetry, Of This River, was published in August 2020.

Learn more about this author