ABOUT THIS BOOK

An incantation of strength and solace for persisting in twenty-first-century America

“History doesn’t repeat, it rhymes.” In his sweeping third collection, Charleston brings a poet’s ear for echo and rhythm to bear on American history and life after 2016. For Charleston, these rhymes cut two ways: the long tradition of American racism and fascism, and the steady pulse of Black persistence. The collection’s titular invocation frames each poem, at times an oratory to rally a crowd, in other moments a private prayer whispered as the speaker gathers himself to face another day. Charleston insists that should we cede memory of our national biography—whether to repression or indifference—we will witness the country’s dissolution into something unrecognizable to most, yet all too familiar to its most marginalized people. But with each reiteration and riff, he also invokes a tenuous hope—that if we summon an American history of Black resistance, we might still make a more perfect union.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

CORTNEY LAMAR CHARLESTON is a Pushcart Prize–winning poet and the author of Telepathologies and Doppelgangbanger. He has been awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation as well as fellowships from Cave Canem and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

REVIEWS

“This collection has moved me so completely, kept me rapt in wonder at its incisive craft and heady treatises-in-verse. While It’s Important I Remember rails, seethes, and spews its rage in equal doses, it also soothes, goads, and, finally, exhorts.” —L. Lamar Wilson, author of Sacrilegion

“This is more than a collection of poetry; these poems are a portal into Cortney Lamar Charleston’s brilliant mind. They challenge orthodoxy, they mine the archives, they expand our imaginations. It’s Important I Remember is magnificent.” —Clint Smith, author of Above Ground: Poems

“Cortney Lamar Charleston’s It’s Important I Remember considers American history’s relentless patterns while confronting our existence within its centuries-old design. Ambitious and unflinching, these poems are lessons in curiosity and compassion—'favor[ing] the right answer, not the correct one.’” —Nicole Sealey, author of The Ferguson Report: An Erasure
— -

TABLE OF CONTENTS

this country is sick

under new management

made in America

pledges of allegiance

property’s rights

justice delayed is justice denied

the opposite of love

insure domestic tranquility

inevitability

sick and tired of being sick and tired

my sister’s keeper

sometimes it be your own peoples

a thing with feathers

to be determined