In his anticipated second poetry collection, Doppelgangbanger, Cortney Lamar Charleston examines the performance of Black masculinity in the U.S., and its relationship to family, love and community.
With the wit and musicality fitting of a 90s baby raised during the Golden age of hip-hop, Cortney Lamar Charleston grapples with the landscapes of Chicago’s South Side and surrounding suburbs, and the tensions that impact a Black boy’s struggle through self-destructive definitions of manhood. While the language in these poems is playful, Charleston’s vulnerability invites readers to intimately witness the speaker’s journey from adopted persona to an authentic self that defies traditional molds.
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With stunning knowledge and sharp vulnerability, Cortney Lamar Charleston has rendered a classical epic of love, war, and self-discovery, in the tradition of Milton, Homer, and Virgil if they were Bone Thugs-n-Harmony.
—Morgan Parker, author of Magical Negro
“Cortney Lamar Charleston burns his signature into these stanzas. With an unrelenting intimacy, he dares us into a narrative we think we know—Black boy vs. the scheming wiles of the city vs. the rest of his life—then backhand slaps us toward a singular experience marked by choices that can only guide the life of one man.”
—Patricia Smith, author of Incendiary Art
“Cortney Lamar Charleston is one of our most necessary observers of Black boyhood in all its beauty and difficulty. These poems sing to us of us.”
—Nate Marshall, author of Finna