Charleston, Cortney Lamar: Telepathologies

Telepathologies by Cortney Lamar Charleston (Saturnalia Books, paperback)

Publication Date: March 15, 2017

Publisher Marketing: Poetry. African American Studies. Winner of the 2016 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, selected by D.A. Powell. Cortney Lamar Charleston's debut collection looks unflinchingly at the state of race in 21st 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 insantiy, and an urgent call to action.

"Cortney Lamar Charleston's poems testify in the eternal court of history; he speaks, as Aimé Césaire once did, 'for miseries that have no mouth' and to liberate 'those who languish in the dungeon of despair.' Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner and nine slain members of Mother Emanuel AME Church—voices silenced through institutionalized racism and the unchecked power of hate—form the nucleus of this powerful indictment of an America still suffering the legacy of its slave-trading past. Timely, immediate, imperative; this is poetry from inside the center of the storm; an urgent and articulate call for change." —D.A. Powell