Fiction writers, to varying degrees, inhabit their characters, demonstrating an inventive imagination that can create worlds around their characters. Even when the fictional novel is written in the first person perspective, most readers are aware that the novel is not really the author's life.
In the case of most con temporary poetry, however, I-confessional poems really are just that -- confessions from the poet about his or her life. Some poets do try their hand at persona poems, writing from the perspective of a historic figure, a character from the literary or mythological realms, or even objects.
But rarely has a poet use his or her imagination to craft an entire history for a person sought by police for months -- until it was discovered the person did not even exist. Such was the labor of poet Cornelius Eady in Brutal Imagination, in which he writes from the perspective of the fictive "black man" that Susan Smith claimed carjacked her and kidnapped her two children.
Eady's poems are spooky indeed, a voice at once both entrancing and chilling as he melds the actions of the black man and Susan. Her hands become his hands, his vision, hers. This is not light stuff. The most powerful poem in this book, Birthing, alternates language from Susan Smith's confession with the voice of her invented kidnapper:
"I went again and stopped.
I then got out of the car."
Susan stares at the sinking.
My muscles aren't her muscles,
Burned from pushing.
The lake has no appetite,
But it takes the car slowly,
Swallow by swallow, like a snake.
"Why was I feeling this way?
Why was everything so bad
In my life?"
Susan stares at the taillights
As they slide from here
To hidden.
"I have no answers
To these questions."
She only has me,
After she removes our hands
From our ears.
There is a second cycle of poems in this collection, which presents poems Eady used as inspiration for his libretto Running Man, which was a 1999 Pulitzer Prize finalist. These poems focus on the black family and the external influences that work to tear it apart.
If you want to truly be moved by poetry with a message, step into the world of Eady's Brutal Imagination.
