Brutal Imagination by Cornelius Eady

Cornelius Eady's Brutal Imagination (2001) is a book in two major cycles. Both cycles center on the experience of black men and black masculinity in the United States.

In particular, the first sections of the book detail a true story. Susan Smith, a white woman, accused an imaginary/fabricated black man of kidnapping her children, but nine days later, she confessed to murdering them by letting her car roll in a lake with the children trapped inside. Eady uses this story to highlight the demonization of black men and the fragility of white women, and the ease with which we see the former as perpetrators and the latter as victims.

The second cycle is a section entitled The Running Man Poems, which has various narrators and points-of-view. These poems comprise a libretto for an opera. In these poems, the Running Man's emergent sense of self is complicated by his status as a black man, and the poems deal with the fabric of his family life as well as his interior world.

The poems of Brutal Imagination do not take on particular formal conventions, but there are snippets of Susan Smith's handwritten confession and parts of the Running Man opera interspersed in their respective sections.

Buy the book:
https://www.amazon.com/Brutal-Imagination-Poems-Cornelius-Eady/dp/0399147209
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/335525/brutal-imagination-by-cornelius-eady/9780399147203/

Author's website:
http://www.corneliuseady.com/