“Sorrow Is Not My Name” both responds to Gwendolyn Brooks’s “To the Young Who Want to Die” and furthers Gay’s own philosophy of life and art, as he uses poetry to study joy. In direct communication with Brooks, and answering to her appeal to choose the vibrancy of life over violence and death, Gay expands upon her poem’s notions of life, joy, and human connection, demonstrating to the readers how his speaker lives out Brooks’s appeal.

In an interview with NPR journalist Krista Tippet, Gay said, “I have really been thinking that joy is the moments—for me, the moments when my alienation from people goes away. And it shrinks. If it was a visual thing, everything becomes luminous” (“Ross Gay—Tending Joy and Practicing Delight.” The On Being Project, 4 Dec. 2020). “Sorrow Is Not My Name” is an attempt to create this sense of luminosity on the page. As the poem develops, building imagery and sound texture, it hurtles toward the final image of community with the niece, the neighbor who “sings like an angel” (Line 21), and the basketball games to come, attempting to defy any sense of alienation between people by creating a sense of loving closeness.