Book Review: Tyree Daye’s Cardinal
What I love best about Cardinal is the nuance and complexity with which it questions Daye’s conflicting desire to both stay in the South and leave, from his complicated relationship to the home that both raised and wishes to kill him to reflections on how being Black in America means being unsafe in America (‘I’ve never been through airport security / without being pulled to the side and searched / to know you can die anywhere / doesn’t feel like flying anywhere’). These remarkably tender verses are filled with love, grief, memory, and musicality: ‘if you see me dancing a two-step / I’m sending a starless code / we’re escaping everywhere.
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