Cardinal

Tyree Daye

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.

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ISBN: 9781556595738

Format: Paperback

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By Land

I’ve lived on dirt roads that bent and ended
at a gate of pines,
the dust skipped up didn’t make my mother
look like a dream. I’ve lived
on roads that dragged through America,
I’ve paced only them to the next town.

The road we kissed on is gone,
rich folks buying up all the city in which we make do.
I miss when Sonny could do a wheelie
all the way down Person Street
and no one would call the police
because he was a part of the neighborhood like the honeysuckle
bush between two yards, and he was beautiful,
not like a horse standing alone in a yellow field,
but like a man is beautiful.

Most of the little towns have a road nicknamed Devil’s Turn,
where someone’s brother died on a Saturday night
while Nina sang Tell Me More and More and Then Some
on the Caddy’s radio,
the moon the color of the oldest cardinal.

Every road isn’t a way out, some circle
back like wolves, you can’t get lost on them
and they won’t lose you, others wait
for you to run out of gas then come alive
with what your mother said would take you.

Every road promises something like a father does,
but when you arrive the town is empty, and you wait
like a child questioning everything, the road itself
laughing like a drunk man falling into a roadside ditch.

The road I’m walking now is howling and full of moon,
hopefully it’ll lead to myself,
hopefully they’ll take me home.

About the Author

Tyree Daye is a poet from Youngsville, North Carolina. He is the author of two poetry collections, including River Hymns, the 2017 APR/Honickman First Book Prize winner. Daye is a 2017 Ruth Lilly Finalist and Cave Canem fellow. Daye’s work has been published in Prairie Schooner, The New York Times, and Nashville Review. Daye won the 2019 Palm Beach Poetry Festival Langston Hughes Fellowship, 2019 Diana and Simon Raab Writer-In-Residence at UC Santa Barbara and is a 2019 Kate Tufts Finalist. …

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Reviews

“A slim collection of beautiful poems about moving (leaving, returning, remembering)… Among the poems are what appear to be family photographs (slightly blurry, like memories), which deepen the feeling of the book as both elegy and archive.”—The New York Times

“[A] striking second collection of poems…  Throughout, Daye investigates where Black people can find safety in a racist America, while memorably cataloguing each area’s complexities and rewards in quiet, nuanced meditations… This book provides a musical, meditative map and account of America.” —Publishers Weekly

“Daye’s big-hearted Cardinal probes and lilts in its questioning around whose movements are free in this country, and whose are not… A ruminative, defiant collection that honors lineages while resisting confinement, declaring: ‘I still watch / what I sing, but I sing.'” —Books Are Magic

“[A] bright new collection… There’s also a sense of rootedness, of deep community…” —Library Journal

“Daye skillfully weaves together both the personal and historical, presenting an experience of living as a Black person in America that is both singular and universal.” —The Arkansas International

“Astonishing… Throughout this book, the poet channels both the living and the dead, and his forceful, highly personal understanding of the American Black diaspora transforms their testimonies into poignant songs.” —The Brooklyn Rail

“These are poems, direct yet lyrical, of navigation in a world that has changed since, but not nearly enough.” —Seattle Met

“Remarkable… In Daye’s work, people, places and things are nearly inseparable, invaluable in the act of shaping one another. The book walks along with them, the poet acting as a cartographer on the way… Generosity attends each of these pages, even as Daye totes hard truths.”—Columbia Daily Tribune

“These spare, elegiac poems also root their journeys in North Carolina, the landscape and family that Daye’s words mourn lovingly. Maybe all travel poems are also meditations on home, but this paradox seems acutely true in Cardinal. Red wings flash though the pages, suggesting the need for flight, yet this beautiful book is deeply grounded, defining territory as birdsong does.”—Harvard Review

As featured in:

The New York Times, “The Best Poetry of 2020”

The Rumpus, “What to Read When You Want to Celebrate Poetry”

Awards

Finalist, Paterson Poetry Prize, 2021