Image: Cornelius Eady
Cornelius Eady’s “Renée Nicole Good Is Murdered”
Cornelius Eady’s “Renée Nicole Good Is Murdered” attempts an elegy motivated by political propaganda instead of poetic insight. With clumsy imagery such as “melted from / The ice pack” and melodramatic effusions such as “see what fucking / With the bull gets you,” the piece descends into propaganda which fails to speak to the gravity of the event to which it refers.
Introduction and Text of “Renée Nicole Good Is Murdered”
Cornelius Eady is a fairly well-known American poet, whose work often exploits race and identity but also often focuses on music. Because the field of po-biz in its postmodern garb currently awards talentless and bombastic versifiers, who engage little more than identify politics, Eady can boast of having received Lamont and National Book Award nominations.
However, Eady’s 2026 piece “Renée Nicole Good Is Murdered” falls flat because it focuses on political propaganda; it shows no characteristic of an authentic elegy and no formal poetic craft.
A traditional elegy reflects and mourns the life of a well-known and/or well-respected individual, who has performed acts that support and defend a country or a set of widely well-regarded principles. Examples of traditional elegies are Audre Lorde’s “Father Son and Holy Ghost,” and Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s “The Queen’s Last Ride,” and Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”
The Subject of the Elegy
Renée Nicole Good was a recent citizen of Minnesota, who, on January 7, 2026, was impeding the work of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents as they engaged in their task of locating and arresting illegal migrants for deportation, many of whom had criminal records for murder, rape, and armed robbery.
As Good attempted to ram her Honda Pilot into an ICE agent, the agent shot and killed her. The event has sparked national attention, with political activists exploiting the sorrowful event to score political points. Democrats governor Tim Walz and mayor Jacob Frey have continued to gin up further violence, encouraging their citizens to continue to impede the ICE agents as those federal agents simply attempt to do their job.
An Elegy Goes Astray
It should be obvious that the subject to this “elegy” does not comport with the definition of a that form; the death of Renée Nicole Good is not a tragedy in the traditional, literary definition, but it is sorrowful event that we all mourn and wish desperately had not happened.
Good’s character flaw lay only in her failure to understand and/or accept the truth of the political turmoil that currently grips the nation, especially Trump Derangement Syndrome, a condition that dictates that anything happening under the Trump administration is evil and must fought against by any means necessary–including attempting to run down an ICS agent with two ton vehicle.
While Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem’s labeling Good a “domestic terrorist” has received pushback, it does seem that the definition of that phrase clearly speaks to what Renée Good was doing that day:
Domestic terrorism in the United States is defined by federal statute in 18 U.S.C. § 2331(5), which states that it means activities that meet three criteria: (A) involve acts dangerous to human life that violate U.S. or state criminal laws; (B) appear intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, influence government policy by intimidation or coercion, or affect government conduct by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and (C) occur primarily within U.S. territorial jurisdiction. [my emphasis added: describing Good’s activism and actions]
Serious Matter Captured by Propaganda
The death of any individual causes concern and sorrow, especially when violence is involved, and the death of Renée Good is horrifying and remains particularly sad because she died because of the misguided urgings she believed from her fellow travelers—including the governor of her state and the mayor of her city.
Now comes the verse maker Cornelius Eady adding more dreck to the filth that has already been spewed about this horrific event. And this time the discourse is masquerading as an elegy—an elegy for an unfortunate, misguided woman whose action has been labeled domestic terrorism!
The subject matter is grave, but Eady’s treatment of it as a elegiac poem makes a mockery not only the human subject but the art of poetic elegy itself. The piece collapses into political sloganeering along with a clunky metaphor that undermines both elegiac seriousness and poetic craft.
Instead of focusing on complex human experience, the versifier substitutes caricatures for genuine people and emotion, such as a “dormant virus” and the “super cops”; these phrases ring in as contrived mountebanks rather than genuine images.
Instead of engaging with any nuanced reality of Good’s actual life and violent death, the piece’s political propaganda sorely diminishes the ability to even grieve, and it has no chance to illuminate.
The piece conflates contrived imagery of viral ice-packs with law enforcement as it inserts overt hostility (“see what fucking / With the bull gets you”). Eady’s obscene, flabby phrasing sacrifices reality for blunt political postering, yielding a piece of discourse that sadly falls flat as an elegy.
Renée Nicole Good Is Murdered
Up rides the super cops,
The cancellation squad.
A dormant virus, melted from
The ice pack,
And the conversation
Is end-stopped when
The shell cracks her
Car window, does its
Dumb duty,
Brings silence
To a poet’s mind.
The President says:
You’re a terror bot
If you don’t comply.
Homeland security
Puts on a ten gallon
Texas size hat,
Says see what fucking
With the bull gets you.
There is a picture of her
Just before it tips rancid,
Just before she’s dragged
Into how they see her.
I wish I could read the words
As they blaze their last, unsuspected
Race through her skull.
A language poem that ends on
The word
Impossible.
Commentary on “Renée Nicole Good Is Murdered”
The piece’s political sloganeering and awkward images undermine the gravity and craft of elegy, and diminish the gravity of the event it intends to mourn.
First Movement: “Up rides the super cops”
Up rides the super cops,
The cancellation squad.
A dormant virus, melted from
The ice pack,
And the conversation
Is end-stopped when
The shell cracks her
Car window, does its
Dumb duty,
Brings silence
To a poet’s mind.
When a piece offered as a poem begins with a bald-face lie in its title, what can one expect from the rest of the piece? The fact is that Renée Nicole Good was not “murdered.” She was killed by an ICE agent, acting in self-defense, as she appears to ram the agent with her two ton vehicle, a Honda Pilot.
The opening stanza attempts to set a dramatic scene with bold imagery: “Up rides the super cops” and “The cancellation squad.” The labeling of ICE agents as “super cops” is talky and unserious, and calling them the “cancellation squad” is equal as vapid. What’s with the grammatical error using a singular verb with a plural subject? That one might be overlooked and laid to an attempt at conversational dialect.
Quite the reverse is true about the “cancellation” notation; instead of canceling anything, ICE’s work entails removing crime and restoring the social order that works well for its citizens. The cartoonish labeling reveals more about the ignorance of real news, immaturity, and disingenuousness of the would-be poet than it does about the target of his ire.
The next line—“A dormant virus, melted from / The ice pack”—is even more asinine. There is no connection between a virus and the Minneapolis shooting of Good. The phrase hangs out like a concocted political conflation, intending to bring to mind the pandemic era as it critiques law enforcement actions as disease-like. Such a metaphor reduces real individuals to abstract threats and hazards.
Poetic metaphor and image require calibration: a powerful metaphor/image resonates with emotional truth. Here, the metaphors as well as the images feel arbitrary and jarring, unanchored to experience or sensation. It, therefore, becomes political propaganda rather than poetic reflection.
The speaker of the piece is undermining his thoughts by marginalizing them with clumsy syntax and incoherent imagery. Lines such as “The shell cracks her / Car window” attempt to point to violence but lack clarity or context, leaving the reader unsure whether the “shell” is literal or figurative.
These surreal pivots never come together to reveal any recognizable emotional reaction or narrative flavor. Abrupt shifts, awkward line breaks, and absurd references place the verse into the doggerel category rather than with crafted poetry.
Instead of exploring grief or loss, the imagery functions to flatten any complexity of thought in favor of bald assertion. As a result, the piece establishes a tone that bespeaks propaganda instead of elegy.
Second Movement: “The President says”
The President says:
You’re a terror bot
If you don’t comply.
Homeland security
Puts on a ten gallon
Texas size hat,
Says see what fucking
With the bull gets you.
There is a picture of her
Just before it tips rancid,
Just before she’s dragged
Into how they see her.
The second movement intensifies these absurdities already presented in the first movement; it shifts into over-drive as is becomes pure political caricature. The claim about what the “President says” reads as hyperbolic ventriloquism rather than credible critique of actual quotation.
Effective elegy builds a sympathetic connection between public tragedy and private humanity, but this piece merely reduces the subject’s death to a cartoonish struggle between an imaginary oppressive state and a pathetically symbolic victim.
The reference to “Homeland security” donning a “ten gallon / Texas size hat” reduces would-be satire to stereotype, substituting fake bravado for engagement with real political language. DHS secretary Kristi Noem often dons Western style outfits, quite appropriately as the former governor of South Dakota.
Profanity-laden lines aim for shock but dislocate the tone of a piece intended to elegize its subject. This tonal imbalance further distances the piece from the contours of elegy. Even gestures toward tenderness—“There is a picture of her / Just before it tips rancid”—feel tacked on and tacky as they are aiming at rhetorical bluster.
Third Movement: “I wish I could read the words”
I wish I could read the words
As they blaze their last, unsuspected
Race through her skull.
A language poem that ends on
The word
Impossible.
The final movement tries to offer some introspection by the speaker, but his attempt lapses into melodrama. Imagining words “blazing” as they “race through her skull” aestheticizes the violent act rather than honoring the dead.
The closing epigram—ending on the word “Impossible”—feels unconvincing because it sounds so completely contrived, lacking the emotional grounding so necessary for resonance.
Through its three movements, the piece substitutes forced metaphor/image, political sloganeering, and abstraction for specificity, empathy, genuine emotion, and reality itself.
Because of all of those weaknesses, the piece fails to meet the demands of a true elegy, instead it collapses into rhetorically heavy, emotionally shallow doggerel that neither illuminates the horrific event, nor does it pay tribute and honor its subject.
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