What Noise Against the Cane

“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