Bailey, Desiree C.: What Noise Against the Cane

Bailey, Desiree C.: What Noise Against the Cane

Regular price $20.00 Sale

Yale University Press, paperback

Publication Date: April 13, 2021

Publisher Marketing: The 115th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets is a lyrical and polyvocal exploration of what it means to fight for yourself​

What Noise Against the Cane is a lyric quest for belonging and freedom, weaving political resistance, Caribbean folklore, immigration and the realities of Black life in America. Desiree C. Bailey begins by reworking the epic in an oceanic narrative of bondage and liberation in the midst of the Haitian Revolution. The poems move into the contemporary Black diaspora, probing the mythologies of home, belief, nation and womanhood. Series judge Carl Phillips observes that Bailey's "poems argue for hope and faith equally. . . . These are powerful poems, indeed, and they make a persuasive argument for the transformative powers of steady defiance."