Cornelius Eady Books

This collection is made up of two cycles of poems, both dealing with the black man in white America. The first is a cycle of poems narrated by the Imaginary black man Susan Smith invented to cover the killing of her two children. This collection is deep! It's so moving and so vivid it leaves you angry and pulls the heart strings.Eady paints such a picture you can see the tail lights slowly slipping into the water.
The second cycle is about a black family and the barriers of color. I had the pleasure of listening to Eady read from this collection as well as his work in progress. He is very moving. And like he said" The best thing about this is....there is no black man on death row right now for murder because of the imaginary black man she created". This is more than a collection of poetry. Brutal Imagination is the brilliant, stunning creation from one gifted writer.

Dawn
Mahogany reviewer

This is one of the jewels of my poetry collection. The poems--particularly the ones in which Eady takes the persona of the black man Susan Smith claimed kidnapped her children--are haunting, intelligent, and vivid.

I was lucky enough to hear Cornelius Eady read from this book in 2001--he has a great presence, and made the poems even more electrifying. Even if you can't get to an Eady reading, though, if you enjoy poetry--especially imaginative and/or sociopolitical poetry--you need to buy this book!

When Susan Smith murdered her young children, she blamed the crime on a black man. When Charles Stuart murdered his wife, he did the same. In the first half of this powerful collection, Cornelius Eady gives voice to this imaginary black man who so often acts as our collective scapegoat. The premise is brilliant, and the poems themselves are powerful--starkly musical and plainspoken.

I love to read, but poetry isn't usually my first choice...or my second, or my third. In fact, I usually don't like to read poetry written by anybody over the age of 12, because it so often strikes me as pretentious and tiresome. In spite of this, I decided to take a class in African-American poetry just to see if I could gain a better appreciation for this form of art. I have, and Cornelius Eady is a huge part of this. Right before the last section of the semester, which included this book, and "On the Bus with Rosa Parks" by Rita Dove, I had become disillusioned by the poetry of such people as Audre Lorde. I felt that I just wasn't getting something, and was missing what it was that made poetry appeal to so many other people.

These feelings changed when I read the first section of "Brutal Imagination". It was like, "YES"!! Finally. Finally I not only understood what the poet was saying, but I also liked the way he was saying it. I don't pretend to be knowledgeable about the different movements in American/African-American poetry, but I feel like I'm 100% with whatever school Cornelius Eady represents. The first section of poems, which was written from the point of view of the mythical black man created by Susan Smith to explain the disappearance of her children, just touched me. I could so identify with this man, who was correctly identified as a person about whom others would believe the worst, because I know so many people who he could be. It's frightening to think of how little our "social advancements" in the area of interracial relations mean in the face of challenges by people like Susan Smith and Charles Stuart.

This book of poems is not just for black people, or Americans, or any one group of people; I even recommend it to those who don't even like poetry. Go ahead and read it, you might surprise yourself.

Contrary to the first reviewer, I find the subject matter of this book ingenious. If the subject of race (and gender) is old and overdone, then why are black males wrongly accused on a daily basis of committing crimes they didn't commit? Why the constant suspicion of those who are different from us?

Even more important than the subject matter is the fact that this invisible, even non-existent, man's voice is convincingly and beautifully rendered. By writing about a man whom no one understands, who is conjured up at will from the darkest regions of white America's consciousness, I, as a white woman am able to relate on a visceral level, to recognize my own blindness and knee-jerk reactions, and also to identify with the character who has been marginalized.

This book is amazing for its refusal to judge evil. Instead of offering solutions, Eady gives us the opportunity to become other people, to live their lives and their truths. By the end of the book, my world seems a much bigger place than it did before I started reading.

Cornelius Eady writes beautiful prose and poetry, subjects ranging from the hardships he faced while growing up to his love of dance. "You Don't Miss Your Water" is the tale of Eady exploring his past as he watches his father slowly die. Of all his published works this is the most well written and touching accounts from his personal history.

You Don't Miss Your Water, is a compact collection of twenty-one prose poems exploring his "ornery and cantankerous" father's illness and death. Beyond writing elegy, beyond "hospital deathbed" and "funeral home" poems, Eady attempts to untangle his father's less-than-angelic past--infidelities, bitterness toward a darker-skinned son, lies, secrets about a half-sister previously unknown to the family--while at the same time dealing with the uncomfortable errands of the immediate present...

Evenn while dealing with the confusion, anger and bitterness surrounding his father's death, Eady tempers these beautiful poems with honesty and affection...Throughout the book he weaves memory with the immediate discomforts of grief, writing his way clearly and without ornament through the lies and bitterness of his father's life. In doing so, Eady pulls off a fine book of poems, proving, as he closes the book, that "every hymn is a flare of longing, that the key to any heaven is language."

The title of "The Autobiography of a Jukebox" calls to mind a jukebox telling its life story through its songs. In this way Eady's title hints at the way his book will examine a subject--a house, a narrative, a photo--through the medium of itself. This technique can be highly effective, as in "Money Won't Change It (but time will take you on)." In this poem, the speaker reflects on the jealousy and destructive competition of a community by reconstructing the conflicts among neighbors: "'You're rich, lady,' hissed the young woman at/ My mother as she bent in her garden." Eady's technique of letting jealousy and competition tell their own story evokes (through his layering of subject and object) the claustrophobia of the neighborhood.

But in the political section of Eady's work (titled "Rodney King Blues"), Eady's technique collapses into polemics. In "Nobody's Fault But Mine" the speaker simply attacks the defense team's interpretation of the beating; Eady's political position is understandable, even admirable, but this is a subject best confronted head-on by the prosecution, not a poet. Nonetheless, Eady possesses quite a talent for descriptive narration. If there's a slow-spun, endearing quality to some of these poems, it is balanced by an equally charming use of the occasional cliche.

I found this to be a very direct book, a very accessible book of poetry I would, in many cases, be hard-pressed to distinguish from prose. This is especially apparent in the "Rodney King Blues" section, where four of the seven poems look and read almost like prose poems. Its similarity to prose I would attribute to three techniques: informal diction, a direct, very narrative tone, and interesting line breaks (or lack thereof).

Eady uses words wonderfully in juxtaposition. For example, in "Anger" "spin doctors do their stuff" and the "op ed page" appears, as does "haughty anger" and a "dark sunglassed angel repository". Common speech coexists with poetic diction; I enjoyed this very much and would strive for it in my own work for the sake of the variety and shock value it lends the poems. Eady's poems, especially the prose-poem-like ones, are written as if the speaker is just talking to the reader, telling stories of family, pain, music and lyric, love, even his hair. I really enjoyed the personal element that this informal language and narrative tone brought to the poems. They seem to capture experience without mediation and present it very honestly while avoiding plainness. I notice, though, that despite Eady's conversational tone and speech-like word choices he makes each word work, as in "Johnny on the Mainline": "This man, who I am quickly learning I don't know well at all anymore, is a broken heart, and a heartbreaker" (note the very long line). His skill with words is something I admire and strive for in my own work.

Formally, Eady's poems are intriguing, particularly as regards their lineation. He usually (in this book) alternates between very short, fairly rhythmic lines of two or three beats without many stanzaic divisions and verse paragraphs without any line distinction whatsoever. The 'metered' poems recall song lyrics to mind in the manner in which they sound more formal but maintain the direct conversationaly connection with the reader. I like his style very much: it is the trained speech of a skilled storyteller who can concisely engage his audience. His poetry, I believe, would be a good example of "formal, free, and fractal verse" (see Alice Fulton's 1985 [?] essay on form in contemporary poetry).

I also found his division of the book into sections to be particularly effective. His writing is very thematic - I sometimes wonder if he's exploring an issue thoroughly or beating a dead horse - and fits well within the sections. The section titles I love. "Small Moments" I found delightful: the poems show just that, small moments, but they sparkle and are exactly the sort of thing I find intriguing as a reader and about which I would like to write.

As with perhaps any book, the more I read Eady's 'Autobiography of a Jukebox' the more I like it. Its voice begins to sound like that of a friend - a very real, powerful, wryly aware and devilishly hilarious friend.

What a wonderful book. As he did in The Autobiography of a Jukebox, Eady envelops us in a world we will all recognize and yet he makes us look at it with a new set of eyes. This book is devoted to exploring the dance of life, many times in the form of anaphora. This lends a musical grace to these poems. You find yourself returning to these poems again and again. The poems themselves take us from a piano concert to a sort of ode to a ballet dancer to a couple planning their new house and beyond. A transcendent book of poetry. In The Woman Who Dances With God, he writes "Let's assume that when we die/Our souls go to heaven/That places a high premium/On asthetic values." Let's hope Eady's poems meet us a heaven's gate!