River Hymns

"Tyree 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 the wall of the church old and swaying
has something
up his sun-touched sleeves

Tyree Daye is a Cave Canem fellow. His poems have been published in Prairie Schooner, Nashville Review, Four Way Review, and Ploughshares. He was awarded the Amy Clampitt Residency for 2018 and The Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award. He lives in North Carolina.