Before the first lines of “Sorrow Is Not My Name,” Gay establishes that his poem is in conversation with Gwendolyn Brooks, one of the most important poets of the 20th century. By writing “after Gwendolyn Brooks” after the title of his own poem, Ross directs the reader’s experience of the poem, suggesting a lineage for his work. Brooks, a Black poet deeply concerned with racial justice and social problems affecting the Black community, provides a commanding directive at the end of her poem, one that Ross, a Black poet from a succeeding generation, takes up and responds to. While Gay does not specify which of Brooks’s poems he is answering, the final lines of “Sorrow Is Not My Name” adhere closely to the final lines of Brooks’s 1986 poem “To the Young Who Want to Die.”

Gay’s poem begins in dismissal: “No matter the pull toward brink. No / matter the florid, deep sleep awaits” (Lines 1-2). The odd syntax, eschewing articles to create a denser sound texture, jogs readers out of their expectations, establishing that the speaker wants the reader to look at the everyday things of the world and reconsider their details, and not become hung up on notions of mortality.