The Joy is a dialogue between two texts. Ross Gay’s acclaimed meditation on love, nature, and the loss that illuminates beauty “The Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude” accompanies Robin William’s famous Good Will Hunting monologue “Your Move, Chief”. 

I developed the book over the course of four weeks, exploring how the texts could act as a foil to one another, both thematically and visually. I pitted William’s explanation of a hollowed, analytical reality against Gay’s meanandering, dazzling exaltation of the mundane. The result was a small, accordion-bound, personal book forty-six pages in length. Diagramatic representations of great art sterilized the monolgue, while small production elements animated Gay’s lines which at every moment overflowed their containers. The poem, unbound to grids and magnified by short-sheets, asked the reader to consider each line itself for the beauty it held.