Cornelius Eady

A bracing poetic reflection on the deadly power of the white imagination from acclaimed writer Cornelius Eady. This spare and haunting play takes its inspiration from the case of Susan Smith, a white woman who murdered her two young children by strapping them into the back seat of her car and pushing it into a lake. In statements to the police, Smith claimed she had been carjacked by a young Black man. In Brutal Imagination, adapted from his National Book Award-finalist poetry cycle, Eady conjures this imaginary Black man as Mr. Zero, who appears in order to "to get things done" when white people need a scapegoat for the consequences of their own actions. As Smith spins her story into more and more elaborate designs, Mr. Zero begins to rebel against his appointed task, leading Smith, and us, slowly closer to the dark secret at the center of the play. Brutal Imagination implicates not just the small town of Union, South Carolina, but an entire American racial imaginary in which a white woman's story, no matter how ludicrous, is always believed if it implicates a Black man.

Winner of the 2022 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry PrizeFraternal Light: On Painting While Black: Poems for Beauford Delaney is a lyric evocation of the life and work of the great African American artist Beauford Delaney. These poems pay homage to Delaney's resilience and ingenuity in the face of profound adversity. Although his work never garnered the acclaim it deserves—and is finally receiving—Delaney was well known and highly respected in African American cultural circles, among bohemian writers and artists based in Greenwich Village from the 1930s to the early 1950s, and in Parisian avant-garde and expatriate enclaves from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s. Drawn to Delaney's painting and personal history through her emotional response to his work, especially his portraits, Arlene Keizer has crafted a diasporic ceremony of remembrance for this Black, gay male visionary. Fraternal Light offers back an answering complexity to Delaney's life and work. One form of art calls out; another answers. Keizer's poems make the contours and challenges of Delaney's life visible, which is especially urgent in a world still frequently hostile or indifferent to Black creative brilliance.

"...thoughtful recollections, scary memories, articulate reflections, and the resolve of a man who has been there."--Publishers Weekly At age nineteen, Hugh Martin withdrew from college when his National Guard unit was activated for a deployment to Iraq. After training at Fort Bragg, Martin spent 2004 in Iraq as the driver of his platoon sergeant's Humvee. He participated in hundreds of missions including raids, conducting foot patrols, clearing routes for IEDs, disposing of unexploded ordnance, and searching thousands of Iraqi vehicles. These poems recount his time in basic training, his preparation for Iraq, his experience withdrawing from school, and ultimately, the final journey to Iraq and back home to Ohio. Hugh Martin holds an MFA from Arizona State University. He is a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

Things That No Longer Delight Me is a collection of poems about family and memory. This book is filled with objects. The author writes: I like objects for company, to decorate the plainest spaces, decorum and I amass details, jade bracelet, her animal-print dresses, an oval coral cameo. How do objects counter loneliness, she asks, and speak to us of how to behave? In Things That No Longer Delight Me, lyric is driven by a compulsion or need to collect, in order to make sense of the past and stay connected to it. And what if that connection were to be lost? Confronting loss, the book pieces together a family history from stories fragmented and overheard. It asks: What is hearsay and what is history? It seeks to embody story, or historical detail, in lyric form. Resisting nostalgia, its poems respect what is diminished by grief or loss yet reveal details that hold sway over us and give us continuing pleasure.

Things That No Longer Delight Me is a collection of poems about family and memory. This book is filled with objects. The author writes: I like objects for company, to decorate the plainest spaces, decorum and I amass details, jade bracelet, her animal-print dresses, an oval coral cameo. How do objects counter loneliness, she asks, and speak to us of how to behave? In Things That No Longer Delight Me, lyric is driven by a compulsion or need to collect, in order to make sense of the past and stay connected to it. And what if that connection were to be lost? Confronting loss, the book pieces together a family history from stories fragmented and overheard. It asks: What is hearsay and what is history? It seeks to embody story, or historical detail, in lyric form. Resisting nostalgia, its poems respect what is diminished by grief or loss yet reveal details that hold sway over us and give us continuing pleasure.

From Cornelius Eady, one of America's most engaging voices, comes an exciting collection of poetry that at once delineates the arc of the poet's universe and highlights the range of his considerable talents. Cornelius Eady's poems show him in full control of his considerable talents and displaying a rich maturity as he enters midlife. His poems are sly, unsentimental, and witty, full of truths that are intimate and profound. Hardheaded Weather ranges widely, reflecting the new found responsibilities Eady has assumed as he transitions from urban renter to nonplussed rural homeowner, as well as the sobering influence of war and the intimation of his own mortality. Yet even at his angriest, the poet has always had a depth of compassion rare in our polarized age, with a sense of humor that is both sophisticated and demotic. These poems will resonate deeply. As exciting as the new poems are, his selected earlier poems dazzle, too, as they demonstrate the arc of Cornelius Eady's maturation and the originality of his voice. Taken together, Hardheaded Weather forms a moving--and sometimes searing--testament to the power of poetry.