Be Holding by Ross Gay

Be Holding
Ross Gay
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020
ISBN : 9780822966234

Ross Gay's fourth book of poetry, Be Holding, is ostensibly a book-length rumination on Dr. J (Julius Erving) and his unforgettable scoop-shot in the 1980 NBA Finals against the Los Angeles Lakers, but we quickly find out it's about so much more. Gay uses Erving's baseline scoop as the inciting incident for all of his characteristic explorations of gratitude and delight pulled through a tunnel of grief. It would be fair to argue that Gay can find delight almost anywhere, but one of the many geniuses of this work is the fact that it refuses to shy away from the brutal realities that make that hard-won gratitude so vital. Gay interweaves the atrocities of slavery into a description of the book’s cover photo, a Farm Security Administration photograph published in 1941 and shot by Jack Delano, which depicts a Black woman and a young boy standing in a doorway: 

and her muscled forearms are fortressed
across the diagonal striped pattern

of her dress which toward the knee has two holes,
and suddenly like that her dress becomes

a map of the trades,
the holes of the bodies

of islands cast in the windcombed sea,

In the acknowledgements, Gay sites Amiri Baraka’s “An Agony As Now” and a separate, unpublished quote of Baraka’s as influences on Be Holding: “At the bottom of the Atlantic ocean there’s a railroad of human bones.” Be holding is a book length balancing act of the unbelievably painful and the soaring of delight and care. 

The commodification of Black people is at the heart of the book and given its focus on historical photographs and the footage of Dr. J’s move, Be Holding becomes both a sharp critique of the racial gaze/our practice of witnessing, and a reminder of the still rippling effects of the very first commodification of Black life. Gay indicts one example of reckless witnessing by examining Stanley Forman’s Pulitzer Prize winning Marlborough Street Fire photograph, which depicts a Black woman and a young Black girl plummeting from a collapsed fire escape. He writes:

—you have seen, I hope—
for in the photograph neither are they named

given as the photograph’s two titles
are Marlborough Street Fire

and Fire Escape Collapse,
and imply no violence or horror upon these two people,

Gay blows up one moment in history—The Doctor’s shot—taking a magnifying glass to all its pixelated corners, stretching and melding that moment with nearly all of history. Movement like this makes transitions a necessary precarity, but Gay manages it over and over with a sedated precision. Early in the book he seamlessly slips out of a description of the flying Igbo myth and into a description of Dr. J’s flight in the finals: 

they shake loose and tumble from their ankles and wrists
erasing through the sky and into the sea

like names disappearing from a ledger,
hovering there like a school

looking down at us,
watching,

as Doc continues his flight
over the baseline,

his arm extended in the midst of its cyclone

Be Holding, from its first word to its final unpunctuated pause enacts the poetic practice of Witness. Gay has taken up Nikky Finney's directive to “Be camera, black-eyed aperture” (from her poem “Instruction Final: To Brown Poets from Black Girl with Silver Leica.” If you are planning on reading Be Holding, I strongly recommend you read Gay’s essay “Be Camera, Black Eyed Aperture” published in the Sewanee Review. In the essay, Gay expertly elucidates the power and practice of Finney’s work, her witnessing; and we can clearly see how Finney is one of the many writers Gay is indebted too. Gay takes Finney’s example and from it, builds his manual of flight and then embodies and enacts it in Be Holding.

Be Holding argues, through its careful, meticulous witnessing of Dr. J's aerial genius, that this iconic play is a moment of the un-witnessable just as much as the mass suicide that inspired the legend of the flying Igbo. Gay seems to argue that without this constant attending and re-attending we can’t actually know how to witness Dr. J's inventive brilliance. And if we don't know how to witness one of the most famous shots in basketball history, what else don't we know how to witness? Gay believes the way that we witness the world can make the world and Be Holding is something of a guiding text for our practice of witnessing. 

One of my favorite moments in the poem is one of self-reflection where Gay's speaker has to pause and ask themself what’s being practiced: 

one boy laying on his side 
with a small stack of schoolbooks wedged

beneath his close-shorn head,  
the algebraic equations tumbling

A few lines later the description comes to its reflective head:

and do you know while composing this 
I almost dreamed some doom upon that child 

dozing beautifully in my poem
dreaming now above the flying—

what am I looking at 
what am I practicing 

The titular poem of Ross Gay’s third poetry collection, Unabashed Gratitude includes these words: 

no duh child in my dreams, what do you think
this singing and shuddering is, what this screaming and reaching and dancing
and crying is, other than loving
what every second goes away?

In Be Holding, Ross Gay is once again saying, the tender, careful practice of reaching out towards one another, “the reaching that makes of falling flight” despite the messy wreck of human experience, might very well be everything!

JALEN EUTSEY is a poet, book reviewer, and sportswriter from Miami, Florida. He earned a BA in English from the University of Miami and an MFA in poetry from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. His work has been published in Into the Void, Northern Virginia Review, Florida Review Online, Cellpoems, and others. He lives in Baltimore.