Desiree C. Bailey is a poet, writer and teacher. Her debut poetry collection What Noise Against the Cane is the winner of the 2020 Yale Younger Poets Prize and is forthcoming from Yale University Press in 2021. She is also the author of the fiction chapbook In Dirt or Saltwater (O'Clock Press, 2016), and has work published in Best American Poetry 2015, Callaloo, Washington Square Review and The Rumpus, among other publications. She has a BA from Georgetown University, an MFA in Fiction from Brown University, and is an MFA Poetry candidate at New York University. She has received fellowships from the New York State Council on the Arts/New York Foundation for the Arts, Poets House, Kimbilio Fiction, The Conversation, the Norman Mailer Center, Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop and Princeton in Africa. She is a recipient of the 2013 Poets and Writer's Amy Award. Desiree was born in Trinidad and Tobago and lives in New York.
Yale University Press is pleased to announce a winner in the 2020 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. The judge, prize-winning and critically acclaimed poet Carl Phillips, has chosen Desiree C. Bailey’s manuscript, What Noise Against the Cane.
Series judge Carl Phillips says: “Desiree C. Bailey’s What Noise Against the Cane opens in the immediate wake of 18th-century Haitian slavery and revolution, and the poems go on to enact the psychological, very visceral quest for an understanding of the self apart from the colonization that the historically colonized are forever being reborn into. ‘I want to say I am from nowhere and everywhere. But that feels coy like I am lifting my skirt for the empire’s gaze,’ says one speaker, from the exile that always contains, within the word itself, the Yoruba word for home – what’s forever just out of reach. Bailey wrestles with how history can make of the self an exile from itself; the poems here work like shifting maps, each an attempt to make a way back to that self, and then past it – which is to say, the poems argue for hope and faith equally, despite fears that ‘I will always be/out of body, I will always fall//outside the lines,’ despite realities like the fact ‘that Trayvon [will] not be avenged.’ These are powerful poems, indeed, and they make a persuasive argument for the transformative powers of steady defiance: ‘I will not go mad. I am vessel,’ Bailey insists; ‘my hands are the scarlet ibises/soaring the salt-washed dawn/cleaving the sky open like a blade.’