Absolutely adore the poetry of Ross Gay. Who else should I be reading?

November 3, 2023 9:21 AM

I'm very new to poetry and recently stumbled across the poetry (and essays) of Ross Gay and loved them. I really want to read more of this style of poetry but I don't know what search terms to use. Is there a name for his style of writing for example? Which other poets should I look out for?
posted by mooders to Society & Culture (6 answers total)

I was not familiar with Ross Gay until reading your post. I looked at several of their poems on the Poetry Foundation website. I agree they are lovely. I can't think of any particular type or genre of poem they fit into other than "contemporary." I can think of four resources for exploring similar contemporary poems:

1. Explore the sidebar on the author page on the above mentioned poetry foundation website.
2. Read Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World by Pádraig Ó. Tuama. It's a collection of mostly contemporary poems by different poets. You might not like them all, but it will help you learn about a range of contemporary poems.
3. Subscribe to a magazine/journal that is either all poetry or includes a lot of poetry. Good ones include Paris Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry Magazine.
4. Google "Poets recommended by Ross Gay." I notice in interviews with poets and authors, they are frequently asked to recommend other poets and authors. A quick scan of the results show that they have answered this question several times.

A couple other things that might also help: The best advice I ever got about reading poetry was to read poetry (I think I saw this on the green at some point). I never read it when I was younger and struggled to get into it, but the more I did it, the more I liked it. The second best advice I got was to read Stephen Fry's Ode Less Traveled. Not everyone likes it, but it really helped me understand some basic stuff about poetry that I never learned in school, and that helped me to gain more comfort reading it.
posted by OrangeDisk at 10:39 AM on November 3, 2023

Also love Ross Gay's poetry. Highly recommend his good friend and fellow writer, Aimee Nezhukumatathil -- they have a lovely chapbook together called Lace and Pyrite.

Goodreads recommends the following writers as similar to Ross Gay, and they're all great in my opinion: Ada Limón (current poet laureate and a favorite of mine), Marie Howe, Victoria Chang, Claudia Rankine, Aracelis Girmay, Ocean Vuong, Saeed Jones, Solmaz Sharif, José Olivarez, Natalie Díaz, Hanif Abdurraqib, Clint Smith, Kaveh Akbar.
posted by wicked_sassy at 10:44 AM on November 3, 2023

Ross is a Splitista; the Split This Rock poetry database should have lots of other poets you will like.
posted by shadygrove at 10:56 AM on November 3, 2023

You might scan through the archives of Poems for the Resistance. Ross Gay, and a lot of the poets wicked_sassy mentioned, were included there. Definitely a lot of others, too, whose styles are very different, but it might be more of a curated anthology for what you're looking for.
posted by lapis at 12:43 PM on November 3, 2023

You might also enjoy Nikki Finney, Jericho Brown, and Toi Derricotte.
posted by TwoStride at 4:19 PM on November 3, 2023

Fred Seidel might be a foundational recommendation from the generation before most of the writers mentioned so far. His stylistics, tone, meter, and presentation are broadly recognizable in (especially American) contemporary work.
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 4:52 AM on November 4, 2023