Telepathologies

by Cortney Lamar Charleston

Cortney Lamar Charleston's debut collection looks unflinchingly at the state of race in twenty-first-century America. Today, as much as ever before, the black body is the battleground on which war is being waged in our inner cities, and Charleston bares witness with fear, anger, and glimpses of hope. He watches the injustice on TV, experiences it firsthand at simple traffic stops, and even gives voice to those like Eric Garner and Sandra Bland who no longer can. Telepathologies is a shout in the darkness, a plea for sanity in an age of insanity, and an urgent call to action.

Genres: Poetry, Race

136 pages, Paperback

First published March 15, 2017

About the author

Cortney Lamar Charleston is the author of three full-length poetry collections: TELEPATHOLOGIES (Saturnalia Books, 2017), selected by D.A. Powell for the 2016 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize; DOPPELGANGBANGER (Haymarket Books, 2021), named a best book of 2021 by the New York Public Library and The Boston Globe; and IT'S IMPORTANT I REMEMBER (Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press, 2026). He was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and he has also received fellowships from Cave Canem and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

Reviews

[Melissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection both lyrically sings a mournful elegy and bluntly indicts our culture's acceptance of violence and racism and toxic masculinity.

Charleston's poems engage with language and form in new ways on every page; he masterfully crafts this collection. Poems like "Blackness as a Compound of If Statements," "Spell Check Questions the Validity of Black Life," and "Po-Po Postlude" cleverly play with its form and diction to illuminate subjects about our culture's view on blackness. Similarly, Charleston's work has a dark wit, as most notably seen in "Miley Cyrus Presides Over the Funeral for the Twerk," to call out the country's hypocrisy. And his careful control over the line and use of metaphor in poems such as "Gynophobia: Fear of Women," "Keeping Jell-O," Hydrophobia: Fear of Water," and "In Theory, We Are All Human" highlight these themes even further.

This book is poetry at its best, revealing all the ways poetry can be both an act of beauty and a call for justice.

[Cedric · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good read. Regrettably, I'm only now getting to Charleston's debut as he works on what will be his third collection, due in '26. These poems are the products of the jubilation and disappointment of the Obama years, the protests over police killings that characterized the era, and self-reflection on black(male)ness and sexuality, among other topics. A non-exhaustive list of faves include "I Think I Know One When I See One" and "State of the Union."

State of the Union

“I see it in the American who served his time… the protester determined to prove that justice matters…”

—BARACK OBAMA

As it stands now—right now—I want
a divorce from everything.

This isn’t some “mommy and daddy don’t love
each other anymore” angst; I was, in fact, born this dark.

I know this body isn’t safe anywhere it goes,
under any circumstance.

If an All-American heart attack doesn’t take me,
it will be a former All-American who took one too many hits

on the field, who says his prayers and eats his vitamins,
who loves his Second Amendment right first,

before all else, exercises it while exorcising a demon,
as he sees it, shooting rounds square in its heart.

Always an “it.” Always “not quite human”
when you look into my eyes

with a flashlight and find I’ve been gone for over three seconds
already. Three minutes already. Three hours already, lying

in the exact same spot on the street. How very sad. How very
sick. How very cyclical, this spinning out of control—

a backlash from the far wings, a billionaire with a big mouth,
a time bomb waiting to blow in the shadows, somewhere.

And let me say this: you know nothing of gloom
until you’re mourning strangers with regularity,

going to their televised funerals, watching the first
President of the United States of your kind of citizen sing

a spiritual penned by slave-trading hands, the whole scene
a sum up: our American sins can never be paid for in full.

I would never trade my black face for Barack’s black face,
even if Michelle came as part of the deal. I’d suffocate

between the walls of power because power wants me dead
or moving decimals further to the right, evangelizing the dollar;

in my most agonizing moments, when the tumor of grief
has engorged, I joke that it’s his other half that spares him our fate—

the Kansas girl with the ruby slippers—but I know it’s actually
the Secret Service, or maybe even the closely guarded secret

that ever since he told America on live television that a buried
black boy looked like the son he never had, all those growing

years ago, the president has been dead inside. And to that,
I can only say: God bless, God bless, God bless, Barry.

For I know what those hands have signed off on, what
those lips have let slide unsaid into unrecorded history:

all audio-visual broadcasted between both terms lacking
those last kernels of truth that would finally break the scale,

rather than trying to balance it backwards toward a false calm
some folks lived with but others never could. And didn’t.

[Emily]

An intense read--so many of these poems are about violence against Black bodies. I went a few poems at a time over the course of several weeks. One of my favorites is the very first, "How Do You Raise a Black Child?" ("From the dead. With pallbearers who are half as young / as their faces suggest and twice the oxen they should be. / . . . / Away from the big boys on the block. Away from the boys in blue.") Some really inventive uses of form in poems like "Memorandum" and "Spell Check Questions the Validity of Black Life." Here's a stanza from "American Terrorism in Seven Acts":

"Indifference is figurative language
fit for interpretation like a poem
taught at Columbine High School.

Three dozen shot on the wrong
side of town this weekend; we take
our morning coffee with cream."

[Courtney LeBlanc · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of poems about identity, growing up and surviving as a Black man in America, family, violence, and survival.

from How Do You Raise a Black Child?: "From the dead. With pallbearers who are half as young / as their faces suggest and twice as oxen as they should be. / Without a daddy at all, or with a daddy in prison, or at home, / or in a different home."

from In Case I Still: "My TV's one big eye is Aryan blue, makes my skin glow / bruise purple and ghostly inside its unflinching gaze. // My TV has a loud mouth and won't keep my name out of it. // Today my name is Alton. Today my name is Philando. / Today my name is Korryn, but on air their mispronounce it."

[Joseph Dante · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book should be required reading in every classroom and every American household. Incredibly urgent and relevant for the time we live in, with all the mass shootings becoming almost mundane to our cultural identity and the rampant racism at the root of it all. Powerful poems as activism and a call to action.

[Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Monumentally important subject matter in the hands of a poet whose craft is dazzling.

[jahdae gardener · Rating 5 out of 5]

Emotional, thought-provoking poems. Charleston really captures and puts in words the experiences that many people of color face, but struggle to express.

[Lilyadams · Rating 5 out of 5]

gorgeous & impactful book of poetry about race in america. its been a few years, but this slim volume has stayed with me through them.

[Chanda Prescod-weinstein]

I don’t star reviews of books by friends but everyone in America should read this book.