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/

Seam by Tarfia Faizullah

Seam (2014) explores violence, gender, and survivorship.

The book centers on the narratives of women who were raped (200,000 women total, called birangona) during the liberation war in East Pakistan, which became Bangladesh after the Bengali people seceded and obtained independence. The poems are powerful, lyrical meditations that vacillate between the perspectives of women who survived the sexual assaults ("interviews") and a narrator ("interviewer") who is removed from the experience inasmuch as she is not a direct survivor of the horrors of the liberation war, but rather is from the generation following it. The interviewer--Faizullah herself--has inherited these women's legacy. This interview with Faizullah about Seam explores her privilege, her identity, and her positionality in relation to the women she wrote about. The poems are generally free verse, but there are a few that implement formal devices and techniques; for example, "Reading Celan at the Liberation War Museum" is divided into sections, and the last line of each section is the first line of the next section.

Buy the book:
https://www.amazon.com/Seam-Orchard-Poetry-Tarfia-Faizullah/dp/0809333252

Read more poems here:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56920/reading-celan-at-the-liberation-war-museum
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56921/aubade-ending-with-the-death-of-a-mosquito
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56919/en-route-to-bangladesh-another-crisis-of-faith

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

Jane: A Murder by Maggie Nelson

In the spring of 1969, the body of Jane Mixer was found, fully clothed and beside her copy of Catch 22, in Denton Cemetary, Michigan. This was the third of seven brutal rape-murders, known as the Michigan Murders, to plague the area surrounding Michigan University.

This murder, that of her aunt, would haunt Meggie Nelson throughout her life. Her 2005 collection, Jane: A Murder, explores the murder and its implications, attempting to place it in personal, family,  and historical contexts as it does so.

Nelson's collection, called "inventive, delicate, searing" sources material from a wide range of texts-- Jane's own diary entries, Edgar Allen Poe quotes, photos of Jane, family stories, and Michigan news sources. Nelson expertly interweaves and collages these nonfiction sources-- which often appear as their own pieces-- with her own personal experiences, dreams, and imaginings.

The pieces are broken into unnumbered, thematic sections with titles such as "Figment," "How The Journey Was," "Order of Events," and "Some Questions."

Quoted text appears in quotation marks, italics, and header notations. Nelson notes that she has changed Jane's diary entries slightly to correct spelling and grammar, and, "although this is a 'true story,' [Nelson makes] no claim for the factual accuracy of its representation of events or individuals." Sources are also acknowledged in the Acknowledgements at the end of the collection.

Buy the book here:
https://softskull.com/dd-product/jane/
https://www.amazon.com/Jane-Murder-Maggie-Nelson/dp/1593766580

Read more of the poems here:
https://lithub.com/jane-a-murder/

Maggie Nelson's Website:
https://softskull.com/authors/maggie-nelson/