Bringing the Shovel Down

Ross Gay

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9780822991199
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

Bringing the Shovel Down maps the long and arduous process of being inculcated with the mythologies of state and power, the ramifications of that inculcation (largely, the loss of our humanity in the service of maintaining those mythologies), and finally, what it might mean, what it might provide us, if we were to transform those myths. The book, finally, has one underlying question: How might we better love one another?

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Nursery
• Love, You Got Me Good
• For Some Slight I Can't Quite Recall
• The Syndromes: Doubling
• Bringing the Shovel Down
• Bull Dragged from Arena
• American Dreaming
• The Syndromes: Memorial Syndrome, or Memory
• Glass
• The Lion and the Gazelle
• The Syndromes: Cartographer's Syndrome
• Axe Blade
• Isaac
• Prayer for My Unborn Niece or Nephew
• Love, I'm Done with You
• Solidarity
• The Syndromes: Horologist's Syndrome
• Hollywood
• Within Two Weeks the African American Poet Ross Gay Is Mistaken for Both the African American Poet Terrance Hayes and the African American Poet Kyle Dargan, Not One of Whom Looks Anything Like the Others
• Some Instructions on Black Masculinity Offered to My Black Friend by the White Woman He Briefly Dated: A Monologue
• The Syndromes: The Burden
• From My Car on Broad Street
• Praising the Snake
• Poem to My Child, If Ever You Shall Be
• Love, Here's the Deal
• Say It
• The Syndromes: Mason's Syndrome
• Ode to the Beekeeper
• Ode to the Tongue Orchid
• Ode to the Redbud
• Overheard
• Opera Singer
• The Syndromes: Undertaker's Syndrome, or Gravedigger's Syndrome
• Learning to Speak
• A Poem in which I Try to Express My Glee at the Music My Friend Has Given Me
• Because
• Sorrow Is Not My Name
• The Syndromes: Raining, or Washing
• Again
• Notes and Acknowledgments