Cardinal (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781556595738)

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 twos step/I'm sending a starless code/we're escaping everywhere." These are poems to be read aloud.

Author: Tyree Daye
ISBN-10: 1556595735
ISBN-13: 9781556595738
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Language: English
Published: 10/06/2020
Pages: 80
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.30lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 0.30d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 07/20/2020 pg. 156
Library Journal 09/01/2020 pg. 70