Today’s GalleyCrush is Tyree Daye’s Cardinal, forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press on October 6, 2020.
Perfect pitch: 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.
First lines: “the North Star is irrelevant / miles and miles above my head / I don’t want constellations any nearer / I know there are whole cities all over this country / so bright you can’t see the stars / the sky no wider than the heart is wide.”
Book notes: Paperback, poetry, 72 pages.
Author bio: Tyree Daye is a poet from Youngsville, North Carolina. He is the author of the poetry collection River Hymns, which won the 2017 APR/Honickman First Book Prize and was a finalist for the 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. A 2017 Ruth Lilly finalist and Cave Canem fellow, Daye has published work in Prairie Schooner, Nashville Review, and the New York Times. He won the 2019 Palm Beach Poetry Festival Langston Hughes Fellowship and the 2019 Diana and Simon Raab Writer-In-Residence at the University of California in Santa Barbara, and was recently awarded a 2019 Whiting Award and a 2019 Ragin Rubin Award.
