A chapbook featuring the brilliant poem Cornelius Eady wrote for Zohran Mamdani's New York City mayoral inauguration.
In Proof: Inaugural Poem Suite, Cornelius Eady gathers a searing, supple body of poems that confront American history, racial violence, civic ritual, and everyday endurance with lyrical precision and moral urgency. Anchored by the title poem—written by invitation and delivered to wide acclaim at the inauguration of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani—this collection moves fluently between public address and intimate reckoning. Eady reclaims the poem as witness, ceremony, and instrument of insistence, drawing connective tissue between past and present, private grief and collective memory. At once fierce and elegiac, Proof: Inaugural Poem Suite affirms poetry’s capacity to name injustice, honor survival, and imagine a more capacious civic future.