Brutal Imagination

Finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry

Brutal Imagination is the work of a poet at the peak of his considerable powers, confronting a crucial subject: the black man in America.

＂A hymn to all the sons this country has stolen from her African-American families.＂--The Village Voice

This poetry collection explores the vision of the black man in white imagination, as well as the black family and the barriers of color, class, and caste that tear it apart. These two main themes showcase Cornelius Eady’s range: his deft wit, inventiveness, and skillfully targeted anger, and the way in which he combines the subtle with the charged, street idiom with elegant inversions, harsh images with the sweetly ordinary.

Includes poems that inspired the libretto for Eady’s music-drama Running Man, a 1999 Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Formerly director of the Poetry Center at SUNY/Stony Brook, Cornelius Eady is currently distinguished writer-in-residence at the City College of New York. He has been awarded the Academy of American Poets Lamont Prize, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to Bellagio, Italy, and fellowships from the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Foundation and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. Brutal Imagination was nominated for the 2001 National Book Award for Poetry. The author of six previous volumes, he lives in New York City.