Description
Book SynopsisTyree Daye is a poet of extraordinary ability and surprise. I find new music to delight in every time I come back to this book. I encounter new ways to think about family and community, new ways to wrestle with my own landscape and legacy.Gabrielle Calvocoressi
Winner of the 2017 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize, River Hymns invites the reader into the complex lineage of the values, contradictions, and secrets of a southern family. These poems reflect on the rich legacy of a young black man''s ancestry: what to use, what to leave behind, and what haunts. And Tyree Daye can write the blues one moment and conjure great humor the next, as when he says, I knew God was a man because he put a baby in Mary without her permission.
From Southern Silence:
I''ve only trusted
four white people in my life
my mother showed me
the ropes early I''m afraid
to untie myself get down
from this branch
even the Jesus on th
