Be Holding: A Poem (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780822966234)

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, as well as over his career in both the NBA and ABA. 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.

Author: Ross Gay
ISBN-10: 0822966239
ISBN-13: 9780822966234
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Language: English
Published: 09/08/2020
Pages: 120
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.35lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.70w x 0.40d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 08/17/2020
Shelf Awareness 09/22/2020
Library Journal 11/01/2020 pg. 89