Cardinal /
Tyree Daye.
- Port Townsend, Washington : Copper Canyon Press, [2020]
- 57 pages : color illustrations ; 23 cm.
Includes bibliographical references (page 55).
Field Notes on Leaving -- By Land -- Miss Mary Mack Introduces Her Wings -- Where She Planted Hydrangeas -- The Mechanical Cotton Picker -- Ode to Small Towns -- I Wanted to Place an Ocean -- Ode to Sex -- Oceans on Either Side of Me -- Inheritance -- To: All Poets -- From: Northeastern North Carolina -- When I Left -- Which Ever Way -- How Do You Get to Harlem? -- Ode to the City -- Green Thumbed -- God's Work -- Miss Mary Mack Considers God -- The Motorcycle Queen -- The World Grows -- Would You Miss Me? -- Ode to a Common Clothes Moth -- Leave Yourself All Over -- The Shape of God -- Find Me -- I Don't Know What Happens to Fields -- From Which I Flew -- Undreamed (Mother's Voice) -- Miss Mary Mack Realizes Flying Is Just Running with Wings -- On Finding a Field -- Miles and Miles above My Head -- Carry Me -- Field Notes on Beginning.
"Tyree Daye's Cardinal is a generous atlas that serves as a poetic 'Green Book'-the travel-cum-survival guide for black motorists negotiating racist America in the mid-twentieth century. Interspersed with images of Daye's family and upbringing, which have been deliberately blurred, it also serves as an imperfect family album. Cardinal traces the South's burdened interiors and the interiors of a Black male protagonist attempting to navigate his many departures and returns home-a place that could both lovingly rear him and coolly annihilate him. With the language of elegy and praise, intoning regional dialect and a deliberately disruptive cadence, Daye carries the voices of ancestors and blues poets, while stretching the established zones of the Black American vernacular. In tones at once laden and magically transforming, he self-consciously plots his own Great Migration: 'if you see me dancing a two step/I'm sending a starless code/we're escaping everywhere.' These are poems to be read aloud." --publisher's website.
1556595735 (pbk.) 9781556595738 (pbk.)
2020017914
African American families--Poetry. African American men--Poetry. African Americans--Poetry. American poetry--21st century. Homecoming--Southern States--Poetry. Racism--United States--Poetry. Spoken word poetry.