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/

The Afflicted Girls by Nicole Cooley

The Afflicted Girls by Nicole Cooley (2004) uses the Salem witch trials as a leitmotif and as commentary about contemporary sexism.

The poems take various shapes and forms, but are generally written as free verse. A few poems are stylistically unique; for example, there is one written as an abecedarian ("An Alphabet of Lessons for Girls") and another as an anaphora ("The Mather Boys," in which all lines but the final two begin with "The one").

Cooley includes notes and a brief timeline of the Salem witch trials in the back of the book to further contextualize the poems. Some of the poems are written as if observing past events, with direct quotations from primary sources and the Bible accentuating them. Others are "Archivals," taking place from Cooley's perspective as a modern researcher-poet. Still others are situated in the 20th century, drawing on the witch trials as a metaphor.

The juxtaposition of the community of Salem's treatment of women with that of society's continued sexism is powerful. In one poem (below), the narrator attends a reenacted trial of a woman in which the audience participates. The narrator is troubled by the outcome: the audience votes overwhelmingly to execute the woman accused of witchcraft. The closing lines of this poem are stark and evocative.

Buy the book:
https://lsupress.org/books/detail/the-afflicted-girls/
https://www.amazon.com/Afflicted-Girls-Poems-Nicole-Cooley/dp/0807129461/

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