IT’S IMPORTANT I REMEMBER

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“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 dissolve into something unrecognizable to many, 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.

Advance Praise for It’s Important I Remember

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 How the Word Is Passed and 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

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

Reviews and Commentary

Cortney Lamar Charleston has offered a personal reflection on the arrival of It’s Important I Remember in its contemporary sociopolitical moment at Northwestern University Press’s Incidental Noyes blog here.

You can also find Charleston in conversation about the collection with Mandana Chaffa at Chicago Review of Books.