
What Noise Against the Cane
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
$0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Buy for $7.79
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Desiree C. Bailey
About this listen
The 115th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, What Noise Against the Cane is a lyric quest for belonging and freedom, weaving political resistance, Caribbean folklore, immigration, and the realities of Black life in America. Desiree C. Bailey begins by reworking the epic in an oceanic narrative of bondage and liberation in the midst of the Haitian Revolution. The poems move into the contemporary Black diaspora, probing the mythologies of home, belief, nation, and womanhood.
Series judge Carl Phillips observes that Bailey’s “poems argue for hope and faith equally…. These are powerful poems, indeed, and they make a persuasive argument for the transformative powers of steady defiance.”
©2021 Desiree C. Bailey (P)2022 Dreamscape Media, LLCListeners also enjoyed...
-
Men We Reaped
- A Memoir
- By: Jesmyn Ward
- Narrated by: January LaVoy
- Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five young men in her life - to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, particularly Black men. Dealing with these losses, one after another, made Jesmyn ask the question: Why? And as she began to write, she realized the truth - and it took her breath away. Her brother and her friends all died because of who they were and where they were from, because they lived with a history of racism and economic struggle that fostered drug addiction and the dissolution of family and relationships.
-
-
Tough but important
- By Jermell Powell on 09-26-21
By: Jesmyn Ward
-
Frank
- Sonnets
- By: Diane Seuss
- Narrated by: Diane Seuss
- Length: 3 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
"The sonnet, like poverty, teaches you what you can do / without," Diane Seuss writes in this brilliant, candid work, her most personal collection to date. These poems tell the story of a life at risk of spilling over the edge of the page, from Seuss's working-class childhood in rural Michigan to the dangerous allures of New York City and back again. With sheer virtuosity, Seuss moves nimbly across thought and time, poetry and punk, AIDS and addiction, Christ and motherhood, showing us what we can do, what we can do without, and what we offer to one another when we have nothing left to spare.
-
-
The real real
- By Amazon Customer on 04-10-24
By: Diane Seuss
-
Customs
- Poems
- By: Solmaz Sharif
- Narrated by: Solmaz Sharif
- Length: 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Customs, Solmaz Sharif examines what it means to exist in the nowhere of the arrivals terminal, a continual series of checkpoints, officers, searches, and questionings that become a relentless experience of America. With resignation and austerity, these poems trace a pointed indoctrination to the customs of the nation-state and the English language, and the realities they impose upon the imagination, the paces they put us through.
By: Solmaz Sharif
-
Golden Ax
- Penguin Poets
- By: Rio Cortez
- Narrated by: Rio Cortez
- Length: 1 hr and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From a visionary writer praised for her captivating work on Black history and experience, comes a poetry collection exploring personal, political, and artistic frontiers, journeying from her family's history as "Afropioneers" in the American West to shimmering glimpses of transcendent, liberated futures.
-
-
Absolutely wonderful!
- By ML on 09-27-22
By: Rio Cortez
-
Twice Alive
- By: Forrest Gander
- Narrated by: Forrest Gander
- Length: 1 hr and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the searing poems of his new collection, Twice Alive, the Pulitzer Prize-winner Forrest Gander addresses the exigencies of our historical moment and the intimacies, personal and environmental, that bind us to others and to the world. Drawing from his training in geology and his immersion in Sangam literary traditions, Gander invests these poems with an emotional intensity that illuminates our deep-tangled interrelations.
By: Forrest Gander
-
Felon
- Poems
- By: Reginald Dwayne Betts
- Narrated by: Reginald Dwayne Betts
- Length: 1 hr and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Felon tells the story of one man in fierce, dazzling poems - canvassing his wide range of emotions and experiences through homelessness, underemployment, love, drug abuse, domestic violence, fatherhood, and grace - and, in doing so, creates a travelogue for an imagined life. Reginald Dwayne Betts confronts the funk of post-incarceration existence and examines prison not as a static space, but as a force that enacts pressure throughout a person’s life. Challenging the complexities of language, Betts animates what it means to be a “felon”.
-
-
Resonates
- By Angel Sanchez on 11-04-19
-
Men We Reaped
- A Memoir
- By: Jesmyn Ward
- Narrated by: January LaVoy
- Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five young men in her life - to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, particularly Black men. Dealing with these losses, one after another, made Jesmyn ask the question: Why? And as she began to write, she realized the truth - and it took her breath away. Her brother and her friends all died because of who they were and where they were from, because they lived with a history of racism and economic struggle that fostered drug addiction and the dissolution of family and relationships.
-
-
Tough but important
- By Jermell Powell on 09-26-21
By: Jesmyn Ward
-
Frank
- Sonnets
- By: Diane Seuss
- Narrated by: Diane Seuss
- Length: 3 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
"The sonnet, like poverty, teaches you what you can do / without," Diane Seuss writes in this brilliant, candid work, her most personal collection to date. These poems tell the story of a life at risk of spilling over the edge of the page, from Seuss's working-class childhood in rural Michigan to the dangerous allures of New York City and back again. With sheer virtuosity, Seuss moves nimbly across thought and time, poetry and punk, AIDS and addiction, Christ and motherhood, showing us what we can do, what we can do without, and what we offer to one another when we have nothing left to spare.
-
-
The real real
- By Amazon Customer on 04-10-24
By: Diane Seuss
-
Customs
- Poems
- By: Solmaz Sharif
- Narrated by: Solmaz Sharif
- Length: 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Customs, Solmaz Sharif examines what it means to exist in the nowhere of the arrivals terminal, a continual series of checkpoints, officers, searches, and questionings that become a relentless experience of America. With resignation and austerity, these poems trace a pointed indoctrination to the customs of the nation-state and the English language, and the realities they impose upon the imagination, the paces they put us through.
By: Solmaz Sharif
-
Golden Ax
- Penguin Poets
- By: Rio Cortez
- Narrated by: Rio Cortez
- Length: 1 hr and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From a visionary writer praised for her captivating work on Black history and experience, comes a poetry collection exploring personal, political, and artistic frontiers, journeying from her family's history as "Afropioneers" in the American West to shimmering glimpses of transcendent, liberated futures.
-
-
Absolutely wonderful!
- By ML on 09-27-22
By: Rio Cortez
-
Twice Alive
- By: Forrest Gander
- Narrated by: Forrest Gander
- Length: 1 hr and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the searing poems of his new collection, Twice Alive, the Pulitzer Prize-winner Forrest Gander addresses the exigencies of our historical moment and the intimacies, personal and environmental, that bind us to others and to the world. Drawing from his training in geology and his immersion in Sangam literary traditions, Gander invests these poems with an emotional intensity that illuminates our deep-tangled interrelations.
By: Forrest Gander
-
Felon
- Poems
- By: Reginald Dwayne Betts
- Narrated by: Reginald Dwayne Betts
- Length: 1 hr and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Felon tells the story of one man in fierce, dazzling poems - canvassing his wide range of emotions and experiences through homelessness, underemployment, love, drug abuse, domestic violence, fatherhood, and grace - and, in doing so, creates a travelogue for an imagined life. Reginald Dwayne Betts confronts the funk of post-incarceration existence and examines prison not as a static space, but as a force that enacts pressure throughout a person’s life. Challenging the complexities of language, Betts animates what it means to be a “felon”.
-
-
Resonates
- By Angel Sanchez on 11-04-19
-
In the Wake
- On Blackness and Being
- By: Christina Sharpe
- Narrated by: Melanie Nicholls-King
- Length: 5 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this original and trenchant work, Christina Sharpe interrogates literary, visual, cinematic, and quotidian representations of Black life that comprise what she calls the "orthography of the wake". Activating multiple registers of "wake" - the path behind a ship, keeping watch with the dead, coming to consciousness - Sharpe illustrates how Black lives are swept up and animated by the afterlives of slavery, and she delineates what survives despite such insistent violence and negation.
-
-
Necessary reading
- By Joe Wilson on 08-10-24
By: Christina Sharpe
-
Punks
- New & Selected Poems
- By: John Keene
- Narrated by: John Keene
- Length: 3 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A landmark collection of poetry by acclaimed fiction writer, translator, and MacArthur Fellow John Keene, Punks: New Selected Poems is a generous treasury in seven sections that spans decades and includes previously unpublished and brand new work. With depth and breadth, Punks weaves together historic narratives of loss, lust, and love.
-
-
A Well-Deserved National Book Award Winner
- By Andre on 08-22-23
By: John Keene
-
Deaf Republic
- A Lyric Essay
- By: Ilya Kaminsky
- Narrated by: Ilya Kaminsky
- Length: 1 hr and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Deaf Republic opens in an occupied country in a time of political unrest. When soldiers breaking up a protest kill a deaf boy, Petya, the gunshot becomes the last thing the citizens hear—they all have gone deaf, and their dissent becomes coordinated by sign language. The story follows the private lives of townspeople encircled by public violence.
-
-
Brilliant poems
- By Jen on 02-22-23
By: Ilya Kaminsky
-
Postcolonial Love Poem
- Poems
- By: Natalie Diaz
- Narrated by: Natalie Diaz
- Length: 1 hr and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Postcolonial Love Poem, the brilliant second collection from Natalie Diaz, holds in its pages the urgent appeal for all bodies―bodies of lovers, family, enemies, as well as of language and rivers and land―to be held dearly. In her lyrical landscape, Diaz tenderly prods the wounds inflicted by America onto its Indigenous peoples.
-
-
Divine and Duende
- By Amazon Customer on 11-17-23
By: Natalie Diaz
-
Be With
- By: Forrest Gander
- Narrated by: Forrest Gander
- Length: 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Drawing from his experience as a translator, Forrest Gander includes, in the first powerfully elegiac section, a version of a poem by the Spanish mystical poet St. John of the Cross. He continues with a long multilingual poem examining the syncretic geological and cultural history of the US border with Mexico. The poems of the third section - a moving transcription of Gander’s efforts to address his mother dying of Alzheimer’s - rise like hymns, transforming slowly from reverence to revelation.
-
-
Luminous
- By Radha Marcum on 06-30-23
By: Forrest Gander
-
The Symmetry of Fish
- By: Su Cho, Paige Lewis
- Narrated by: Su Cho
- Length: 1 hr and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Language and lore are at the core of The Symmetry of Fish, a moving debut about coming-of-age in the middle of nowhere. With striking and tender insight, it seeks to give voice to those who have been denied their stories, and examines the way phrases and narratives are passed down through immigrant families—not diluted over time, but distilled into potency over generations.
By: Su Cho, and others