After Ross Gay's father was diagnosed with stage 4 liver cancer, Gay, while caring for his dad, made a surprising and gratifying discovery. His old man had freckles.
"The reason I got that close to him was because he was dying, but the joy it gave me to find out that he had freckles was a kind of grace," Gay said. "Instead of being purely devastated by his dying, I was flummoxed by his beauty."
Move over, Oprah Winfrey, and make room for a passionate exponent of finding rainbows in life's storms. A prolific poet and essayist, Gay writes about his father in "Through My Tears I Saw," one of 14 essays in his new collection, "Inciting Joy."
