Doppelgangbanger

By Cortney Lamar Charleston

Cortney Lamar Charleston is widely recognized and lauded as a poet, and this second collection comes highly anticipated. 

 

Charleston’s poems have appeared in a range of publications, including POETRY, The American Poetry Review, New England Review, Granta and The Nation. 

 

A Pushcart Prize-winning poet, Charleston has received a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation as well as fellowships from Cave Canem, The Conversation Literary Festival and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. 

 

His debut full-length poetry collection, Telepathologies, was selected by D.A. Powell for the 2016 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize.

 

Charleston is currently poetry editor at The Rumpus, and is a tremendous advocate for contemporary poetry, including through social media (@bardsbesidebars).

 

Doppelgangbanger is part of the BreakBeat Poets series, a dynamic and growing series that includes José Olivarez’s PEN/Jean Stein Award finalist Citizen Illegal, Camonghne Felix’s National Book Award long listed Build Yourself A Boat, Kevin Coval’s A People’s History of Chicago, and many others.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Release date: Feb 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9781642592658

Book preview

I.

Hip-Hop Introspective

Starting point: South Side, Chicago. Mid-90s.

The glory days, rocking my high-top fade.

I’m mesmerized by a poster on my uncle’s wall.

The black-tinted sunglasses, Jamaican dreads:

young Stevie Wonder sitting beside the

smiling Bob Marley, looking like two sides

of a DJ’s vinyl, something to be sampled, cut,

and sold like substances I’m not wise to yet.

When records spin, I listen. This is how

children learn here, how they become,

come into everything they already are.

See, my classmates and I come from all over:

from something, from nothing, but come to

the same school, on the same bus, religiously,

as though we were actually confirmed Catholics.

Every day, our ears dialed into 107.5 WGCI.

Every ride, repeating every word, nodding our

heads like we have naps on the brain; nappy

or not, the bus speakers are blowout combs.

We are Afro-American kids: the music

more fitting for us than the collared shirts

for black boys, plaid skirts for black girls.

It sounded like us from the inside of our

mamas’ wombs, new jacks with kick. And

somehow, still, too explicit. Gritty. Aggressive.

Skins we will grow into, to be killed softly.

One girl I talk with has braids like Lauryn Hill.

Six years old, already has to let herself into her

grandmother’s empty apartment, handle keys.

Somewhere there is a guitar she will never play.

In due time, she will be the one who tells me

Tupac is dead, and a blood relation of mine

soon goes in the same way, distantly from me.

Tha Crossroads music video begins to haunt me.

Biggie bites a few bullets. My next-door neighbors

get burglarized, not in South Side proper, though

it moves closer than it already is on our daily drive.

I move farther out when Mom gets a better job.

Dad needs a wheelchair now: a hard-knock life.

I miss hearing Boyz II Men and Blackstreet

everywhere I go. Even the name Backstreet

sounds stolen to me. Meanwhile, an album

on miseducation has only my pictures inside.

I hide my intelligence from my new peers as

an act of protection. Eminem gives all of them

an excuse for making conversation with me,

and I hate Mathers for it for at least four years.

Kids ask what FUBU means. White girls look at me

constantly. DMX never seems to be screaming.

The underground heads north on my playlists

while an old poster peels away from the wall.

I’m beside myself almost always: A-side, B-side.

A Brief History of Poetry

after Dan Albergotti

All day the boy sits behind the house

with his dog; all day the dog sits with him.

Well before then, the boy is dog