“This is solid, mostly titanium,” the surgeon says while I’m still groggy in recovery. “You can’t pull it apart if you tried.,” and, almost as an afterthought, “Don’t try.”
An excerpt from The Rumpus Book Club‘s November selection, Inciting Joy by Ross Gay forthcoming from Algonquin Books on October 25, 2022 Subscribe by Octobet 15 to the Poetry Book…
Being disabled in higher education takes a psychic toll, whether you are faculty or a student. Yet most institutions do the bare minimum to remain “compliant” with the law rather than doing the work to make their spaces accessible and inclusive.
I always received glowing remarks on my alliteration or understanding of poetic devices, but they were hidden beneath what felt like hundreds of tiny red strikes across misspellings—although my phonetic versions of the words were sometimes genius, and always understandable.
. . . to witness the world is always to participate in it, to make choices about what to see and what to ignore, and also to be worked upon by forces of differing scales.
Love can feel muddled, vast, diffuse; so little to do with the singular volatility of a firework. I hunger for that kind of crystalline precision, though. That clarity. To scream myself across the sky just once—consuming everything in my wake—and then vanish from view.
The reason why so many of these stories have metafictional elements is that I was trying to write in an ethical way while feeling like a professional liar.
EMBRACE FEARLESSLY THE BURNING EARTH . . . is a quintessential Barry Lopez book. It is a clarion call to lovers of the earth, but one full of hope and optimism. This is exactly the kind of book we should all be reading right now.