Finalist for the 2021 National Book Award for Poetry, this Yale Series of Younger Poets volume is a lyrical and polyvocal exploration of what it means to fight for yourself
“Bailey invites us to see what twenty-first-century life is like for a young woman of the Black diaspora in the long wake of a history of slavery, brutality, and struggling for freedoms bodily and psychological.”—Carl Phillips, from the Foreword
“Desiree C. Bailey sings true in her debut. Wherever this voice goes a Caribbean sun travels with it transfiguring what a maroon might overhear—a call awaiting response.”—Yusef Komunyakaa
The 115th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, 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.”
About the Author
Desiree C. Bailey is the author of the fiction chapbook In Dirt or Saltwater and has been published in Best American Poetry, Academy of American Poets, Callaloo, and elsewhere. She was born in Trinidad and Tobago, and grew up in Queens, New York. Her website is http://desireecbailey.com. Carl Phillips is the award-winning author of numerous books of poetry, including Wild Is the Wind and Pale Colors in a Tall Field. In 2023 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007–2020. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.
Praise For…
“Bailey can look forward to a great future as a poet.”—L. Ali Khan, New York Journal of Books
Finalist for the 2021 National Book Award for Poetry, sponsored by The National Book Foundation
Longlisted for the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize
Finalist for the 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, sponsored by the Claremont Graduate School
Named One of the Best Books of 2021 by the New York Public Library
Longlisted for the 2022 Dylan Thomas Prize, sponsored by Swansea University
“Bailey invites us to see what twenty-first-century life is like for a young woman of the Black diaspora in the long wake of a history of slavery, brutality, and struggling for freedoms bodily and psychological.”—Carl Phillips, from the Foreword
“Desiree C. Bailey sings true in her debut What Noise Against the Cane. Wherever this voice goes a Caribbean sun travels with it transfiguring what a maroon might overhear—a call awaiting response.”—Yusef Komunyakaa
