Overview

Cornelius Eady turns the inaugural poem into an instrument of reckoning. First delivered to mark the historic inauguration of New York City's mayor Zohran Mamdani on January 1, 2026, the title poem is not ceremony-it is summons. ""You have to imagine it,"" Eady insists, and from that insistence rises a chorus: those called too dark, too queer, too poor, too loud; those renamed invisible; those told ""not now."" What if joy could wear down the rock of no? What if imagination were not escape, but evidence? Moving from Robert Frost squinting into winter glare, to Elizabeth Alexander straightening her back before history, to Aretha Franklin beneath her church-crown hat, Eady braids civic pageantry with private memory. He summons the Colored Conventions of 1830, the 911 call that ricocheted through racial panic, the mock rifles on a Brooklyn rooftop, the ""knife in sheep's clothes."" Each poem widens the frame. Each poem refuses to look away.

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9781961209800

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Poet and playwright Cornelius Eady was born on January 7, 1954, in Rochester, New York. He attended Monroe Community College and Empire State College. Eady is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Hardheaded Weather, a nominee for an NAACP Image Award; Brutal Imagination, which was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award; The Gathering of My Name, which was nominated for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize; and Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, selected by Louise Glück, Charles Simic, and Philip Booth for the 1985 Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets. In 1996, Eady and the poet Toi Derricotte founded Cave Canem, a nonprofit organization serving Black poets of various backgrounds and acting as a safe space for intellectual engagement and critical debate.

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