Brutal Imagination is the work of a poet at the peak of his considerable powers. Its two central sections--which could be called song cycles--confront the same subject: the black man in America.
The first, which carries the book's title, deals with the vision of the black man in white imagination. Narrated largely by the black kidnapper that Susan Smith invented to cover up the killing of her two sons, the cycle displays all of Mr. Eady's range: his deft wit, inventiveness, and skillfully targeted anger, and the way in which he combines the subtle with the charged, street idiom with elegant inversions, harsh images with the sweetly ordinary.
The second cycle, "Running Man," presents poems Mr. Eady drew on for his libretto for the music-drama of the same name, which was a l999 Pulitzer Prize finalist. Here, the focus is the black family and the barriers of color, class, and caste that tear it apart. As the Village Voice said, "It is a hymn to all the sons this country has stolen from her African- American families."
Brutal Imagination
Brutal Imagination
1
How I Got Born
My Heart
Who Am I?
Sightings
My Face
Susan Smith's Police Report
Where Am I?
The Lake
The Law
Why I Am Not A Woman
One True Thing
Composite
Charles Stuart in the Hospital
2
Uncle Tom in Heaven
Uncle Ben Watches the Local News
Jemima's Do-Rag
Buckwheat's Lament
Stepin Fetchit Reads the Paper
3
The Unsigned Confessions of Mr. Zero
What I'm Made Of
What the Sheriff Suspects
Next of Kin
What Is Known About the Abductor
Interrogation
My Eyes
What Isn't Known About the Abductor
Press Conference
Sympathy
Confession
4
Birthing
The Running Man Poems:
When He Left
Hold the Line
The Train
Piss
Armor
Mamie
Failure
Home
Miss Look's Dream
Baby Sister & the Radio
My Sister Makes Me Up While I Sleep
First Crimes
Liar
Sex
Revenge
What I Do
Replaced
Truth
What Happened
Gossip/Denial
Hunger
Denouncement
Running Man
"Eady's joy in language engenders our trust in the music that his art has made of love and pain."
--Publishers Weekly
"Eady fuses headlines and history with language that is a field holler, a blues shout, a hip hop rap that combusts inside the soul and keep on burning."
--Bebe Moore Campbell
O.B. Hardison Poetry Prize
