CORTNEY LAMAR CHARLESTON

I wanted to start by talking basketball with you. I’ve seen you describe yourself as a die-hard Chicago Bulls fan who grew up in the golden age of Bulls basketball, while Jordan and his supporting cast were dominating the league. I’m from Staten Island, and a pretty big Knicks fan myself.

Okay, okay.

Which means that our teams are facing off tonight (Note: This interview was conducted on 4/3/2026). So… I don’t want it to be a contentious interview or anything, but any predictions?

The Knicks are gonna curb stomp the Bulls, is what's gonna happen. We have guys that wear the uniform, but we don’t really have much of a team at this point in the season. 

Is there any hope? Do you have any players, like Josh Giddey, that you think the Bulls can build around?

Giddey and Buzelis are two for sure core pieces for the future. Really, we’re waiting to see what the lottery looks like this year. Do we move up? But even if we don’t, right now we’re slotted, I think, ninth best odds.  If we end up with the ninth pick, in this draft especially, which is fairly deep, that’s not a bad place to be. But if you get lucky, and can get into the top four, you might be looking at a real nice player.

So yeah, we’re just hoping for a little luck. I wouldn’t mind AJ Dybantsa or Cameron Boozer or Darryn Peterson or Caleb Wilson. I’ve got my eyes on a few guys, and the question is, will they be around when our pick is up?

On a podcast called Dear Adam Silver back in 2020, you talked about the poetry of basketball, and how it encompasses the geometry of bodies on the court, the emotional arcs within the game, and the players themselves, who sometimes have such “smoothness and grace that it just reminds you of poetry in motion.” I can definitely see those qualities and the way they get translated into a lyrical space in my favorite basketball poems–I’m thinking about pieces like Komunyakaa’s “ Slam, Dunk, & Hook” which lends the sport mythological flair in its opening lines, declaring, “Fast breaks. Lay ups. With Mercury’s / Insignia on our sneakers, / We outmaneuvered the footwork / Of bad angels.” Natalie Diaz’s “Top 10 Reasons Why Indians Are Good at Basketball” is another one that captures the sport’s beauty and pace so well. I was wondering if you had any favorite basketball poems or favorite poems that embody the speed, dexterity, and swagger of the sport?  

That is a good question, and a really hard question. I’d have to give it some really good thought. Like, of course the Komunyakaa poem that you referenced is a classic, right? It’s funny, because in my mind, I’m thinking less about poems and more about poets who have a history with the sport and how that manifests within their writing. There’s a poet by the name of Denise Frohman who used to be a baller, and Denise has some good poems about basketball. The titles are escaping me right now, but yeah, that’s a poet I think of when I think of hoops. You mentioned Natalie already, so that’s another. Ross, Ross Gay!

That’s true, yeah. 

Ross did the Dr. J-inspired book called Be Holding . It’s literally kind of a love letter and book-length poem for Dr. J. 

I’ve gotta check that out. It sounds cool!

You should. And, I mean, it’s not solely about Dr. J. It uses Dr. J as an inspiration and jumping-off point. It touches on quite a lot across time and history and everything, but Dr. J is like a catalyst.

Yeah, yeah. I don’t really know too much about him on a personal level. Like, I know his style of play and have seen highlights, but I wonder, too, if it gets into his personal story and stuff like that. 

It’s been a while since I spent some time with them. I’m trying to remember the fragments of it in there. But yeah, it’s definitely worth checking out for sure, and Ross, you know, being someone who played, it comes through. I think Terrance Hayes played basketball, too, actually, now that I’m thinking about it.

Yeah, it definitely comes into his Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin. He’s got a line that morphs Jim Crow into “gym and crow.” And even when he doesn’t write directly about basketball, you feel its presence in his poems, I think.

Yes, I look at his work on the page, and I think how does that manifest, or how does the sport manifest within the lyric? You can see that dynamism in what Terrance does. So, when you find out that Terrance used to play basketball, it’s like, “Okay, actually, this kind of makes sense.” It feels like a translation of that in some way. Like, if I were to describe to someone who’s never watched before or played before, what a basketball game is like, how are people moving? I could get with that as a description for how a Terrance poem develops over the course of a read. Yeah, sorry, now I’m just thinking about all this stuff, and I’m like, “Oh, I need to do some more digging, actually.” This is a very fun question.

Yeah, yeah, maybe there’s an essay to write somewhere about it.

Maybe.

I was also thinking about an epistolary poem you wrote called “Dear Basketball” that’s a response to Kobe Bryant’s poem of the same name, which, I believe, was adapted into a short film, right?

Yeah, Kobe’s, they did. 

Yeah. And it’s as much about your love and appreciation of the sport as it is about the social and systemic issues that bleed into it at times. It seems impossible to separate basketball from what’s going on outside the court when you describe Larry Bird’s passing as being so good “he could / almost pass for black, if Indiana, the state, wasn’t suspect / in that way” and remind us of the vehemently racist language of former Clippers owner Donald Sterling.  At the same time, there are moments in it that transcend the political and social, where Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson are shown putting their idiosyncratic talents on display. Can you talk a bit about how this poem veers between social critique and athletic ode?

Yeah, and I think that ground is still ripe for me to do some writing on, to be honest with you. This poem was just me dipping my toe in. Yes, I’m from, you know, the Chicago area. I grew up, as you said, during the Bulls dynasty, but the next big thing after the Bulls is Allen Iverson. When I think about Allen Iverson as a figure, while an excellent and revered player, he was probably an even bigger cultural icon because of how he presented to the world and how he was unabashedly authentic to who he was, where he came from. He embraced hip-hop culture as something that is inherent to him. 

It was always true that rappers and ballers were fraternizing in the neighborhoods, and since Iverson, you’ve just continued to see that relationship at a higher level. You see LeBron or James Harden is hanging out with J. Cole or Lil Baby or whoever it may be, you know what I mean? Like, that relationship within mainstream media has only become more understood, more visible. But with Iverson, at the time, also came a lot of the pushback. There’s the stuff around the NBA dress code and how players show up and represent themselves, and that was a very regressive policy to put in place because it’s got anti-Blackness baked into it. And so I’ve always been intrigued by the way in which the NBA is the preeminent professional basketball league in the world and has always really had these tie-ins to what is happening within Black culture and the Black community. 

You’ve got the Bill Russells of the world, Oscar Robertsons of the world, and the Civil Rights Movement which those guys were participants in. And Robertson leading the charge for free agency, which revolves around a question about labor and how it relates to capital. Like, there’s so much in that. If I parse the history of the league, there’s so much to write about socio-politically, while also writing about how the game just continues to become more and more appreciated by a bigger and bigger audience with Black athletes at the center of it. I think there’s a lot of ripe ground for me to go back to maybe do something more long-form. In my mind, I’m like, “Oh, one day I’ll write essays about this

 That also makes me think back to your “Dear Basketball” poem, and its images of Black excellence, how Jordan sticks his tongue out for a slam dunk, or Magic Johnson, whose face you describe as being contorted by “electric shocks” that make him look “happy / when he runs the fast break.” Those are just great moments of not really thinking of anything besides basketball, or breaking through pain into joy.

Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah. So that “Dear Basketball” poem was like dipping my toe in some of these waters. Because in my mind, all of these associations are very evident. But they might not be what other people think of, so I figured if I’m going to be authentic to myself, I’m gonna write these into an ode to the game. It’s hard for me to write that ode without considering these other aspects of playing or watching the game that are indelibly linked in my mind. 

Yeah. I can see that. I also wanted to talk about something that you do in a lot of your poems: you lend tangibility to language in a number of different ways. Whether pulling language from the U.S. Constitution to make “all the holes in it more evident” or passing words to a cashier at Harold’s Chicken Shack in your poem “Self-Portrait as a Chicken Dinner,” you give a sense of language’s material consequences, the way it can put you in safer schools and neighborhoods or mark you as a potential victim of violence. In “On Recidivism,” a poem from your collection Doppelgangbanger, the speaker, while researching incarcerated individuals, looks back at “the texts of their troubled lives” and thinks about his relative privilege in having “the vocabulary my professors have given me.” Lines like these animate your narratives and show how language is a tool that can be wielded for social and political progress. Can you discuss some of the strategies you use to embody language, to give it a real physical being in the world?

I think where it starts for me and why it ends up coming to life on the page in that way is that I feel like every word we have has its definition, its connotations, its denotations. And with those connotations and denotations, there is almost a type of energy, a type of heat that a word carries. Like if someone is to use, let’s say, an epithet. I know what it feels like in my body for that to land. You get what I’m saying?

Yeah, I can see that. Like an emotional place that it’s gonna hit you in.

Yes, yes. Exactly. And, you know, maybe that makes me angry, and if I get angry, I get a little hot. Or if I get sad, the way my body responds to that. I’m trying to capture a little bit of that response that a word or a piece of language has caused to stir up within me. In my poems, it often ends up manifesting as that physical response, which is something that a reader who is engaging with the text, in being a person themselves, might be able to latch onto. And so it’s about extending that bridge linguistically towards the feeling, but in a way that is clear, descriptive, but most importantly, honest to the intent and to the emotion that I’m trying to embody. 

That’s the process that my mind goes through. I think a lot of it is very intuitive, but I can tell you that my aim, when I’m doing a lot of this stuff on the page, is to capture as best as possible that feeling and create a capsule for it, so that if you experience the poem in some other space and in some other time you still have the artifact of the feeling, and you experience a little bit of it.

It’s interesting to hear you describe it as a kind of heat, because I feel like heat is something you return to often, especially in your new collection. Electricity and currents and the heat they can produce are big motifs, you even have a poem called “It’s Important I Remember That a Current Event Is a Current—” In a poem like this, it’s almost like you’re describing a physics of what language can do to you and how it catalyzes emotions.

 Yeah, no, that’s a really astute read of it. Because in large part, I am trying to do exactly that. For example, the poem you mentioned, “It’s Important I Remember That a Current Event Is a Current—,” that was a natural place to turn to thinking about the spark, the heat that a spark generates, thinking about how do people, when they hear the word “spark,” how do they perceive and internalize that? A spark being something that’s bright and exciting, or a spark being something that’s potentially dangerous, but which one is it? The context changes what a spark means, so let’s take you through a context that I’ve created right here on the page for you. Let’s think about what it means in this context. 

And that’s definitely not the first time I’ve turned to physics in a poem before. I really do look toward insights and other areas of knowledge about the physical and material world to try to allow the emotional world to live alongside it in a way that, over the course of our day, our week, our month, our year, we’re not always attuned to. It’s important for me to make that connection, because one directly affects the other. The emotional world affects the physical, the physical affects the emotional. If I’m grappling with heavy subjects, then those two things have to start weaving together, bleeding together, for it to be a true representation of living through that experience. 

I feel like that’s where your new collection, It’s Important I Remember, comes from. It feels very much “in the shit,” like things are going down, and this is the speaker’s response to that. And, you know, it’s a very hefty collection. It demands from the reader intellectually, emotionally, and literally, just picking it up, it’s a bit heavier than your average poetry book. Weighing in at 14 sections and 248 pages, your book delves deeply into American history, the resounding effects of injustice, and the Black figures who have resisted oppression and modeled ways to dismantle racial hierarchy and systemic degradation. In the vein of Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July” and the speeches and letters of Martin Luther King Jr., your collection points to the stark divide between America’s stated ideals and actual realities, that constitutional bad check that Black folks got “back marked insufficient funds.” With the ornate cursive of your title reprinted above each new poem, it feels as if you are truthfully annotating America’s founding documents and striking through its failed promises in red ink. Can you talk about some of the other ways this collection embodies resistance or, as you say in its final line, how it rewrites “the sentence they gave us?”

Yeah, I think there’s a couple different ways I could approach your question here. So I’m trying to think of which one.

It’s a large question, so I totally get that! Take a second to parse your thoughts out. 

 Okay, thank you, thank you. Because I’m thinking about the conceptions of the collection. I wanted to return to the archives. I wanted to do something that was deeply, deeply rooted in explorations of history, specifically looking for narratives and examples of resistance, given the fact of what I believed I was writing through, which has only proven to be true, being the establishment of an autocratic white nationalist regime within my country. That regime’s rise was powered by, or at least its soil was fertilized by racial animus. It was in response to and following on the heels of Black Lives Matter. So it comes out of and into a racialized context.

I was really looking for lessons that can help steel the spirit through this period. Because the regimes don’t come and go in that sense, like over the long arc of history, we might summarize it that way, but people make regimes, and other people bring those regimes down. If you’re going to bring it down, you have to be equipped for the fight. So it’s like, “Okay, what can I learn from those who have waged this battle already?” Because we’re not fighting anything new, necessarily. Its articulation might be novel in modern American times, but it’s certainly not new. And the things that created the conditions for it have certainly been here since the beginning. And just by going to the archives for this purpose and exploring Black history, Black narratives, I’m already doing the work of asserting that Black history is foundational American history. 

But beyond that, it’s those narratives and those histories themselves, thinking through the particulars of them, how even those examples I’m drawing from happen across decades and centuries. Thinking about how the conditions that led to them are fairly constant despite those differences in time. And so time really begins to function more associatively than linearly. Because that's more authentic to the lived experience. Let’s say I’m looking at what happened in Ferguson or I’m looking at Minneapolis around George Floyd’s murder, I’m seeing what is happening in real time, but I’m also seeing these ghosts or afterimages.

Yeah, like maybe you’re thinking of Rodney King or Emmit Till.

Yes, exactly, exactly. And I carry those events with me because maybe some of them I lived through, but also because others have been passed on to me. Those are catalytic moments that left marks on my parents or my grandparents or whoever down my line. And either by virtue of their telling me the stories or just by virtue, sometimes, of them having experienced it, that exists within me too. And so, when something happens that triggers the recall, I’m experiencing all those things simultaneously.

Yeah, and your opening sestina was a great way to start with that idea of simultaneity, since it is a form that has recursion, that’s weaving everything together. So you could start it with this idea about immigrants having to take a citizen test while “natural citizens get a bye.” But then you could jump all the way back to slave ships coming, and this idea of carrying multiple people within you. And I felt like that was such a perfect way to lead us into the collection and show the confluence of oppressions that have led to our current moment. Can you talk about how that poem came about?

It’s interesting. Even though, technically, it’s the first thing that the reader encounters in the book, it’s actually one of the later things I wrote. I wrote it, mostly, because the book is so layered and expansive and intricate that I was like, “How do you introduce someone to it?” I wanted to produce a singular poem that I felt did the work of moving across registers in time within one straightforward and unified body. And I’m so glad you brought it up because the way that poem moves, it covers so much ground.

Yeah, it’s so timely. Especially considering how birthright citizenship is up for debate right now in the Supreme Court.

Right now, right? Exactly!

It’s got that, but then it’s also got almost the entirety of America's history. 

Yeah, and I wanted to provide that as the offering. It was the residue of the work I had done already, but it was what I felt was necessary for the project to bring a reader into it more smoothly. It encapsulates so many of the themes that the individual sections and then the poems within those sections expand upon. 

Yeah, in that way, it almost reminded me of listening to classical music, where you often get an overture that introduces some of the themes and motifs you’re going to hear later on. You get these little snippets of imagery and sound that are gonna come back. 

What is your approach when you’re diving into an archive, and, not only talking about really famous figures like James Baldwin or Malcolm X, but also more marginal figures like Frederick Douglass’s wife? Did examining these different types of figures affect your process in any significant ways?

 In many respects, the research wasn’t that difficult. Because I’ve been asking a lot of the questions that are relevant for the writing of this book my whole life.  I was always a history nerd. Sometimes I already knew which path to go down. But a big question that I kept returning to is, “Why is this particular narrative relevant to me now?” Because there were so many stories I could draw from, I had to think through what I wanted this project to do.

 I want to know, “what are the things that can draw us together, which is a good thing, and what are the things that can fracture us and make us less capable of responding to the moment. And so I started thinking about some of those other narratives, the more marginal ones. Because over the course of American history, in focusing in on Black American history, which is the context I come out of, one of the challenges has always been that advancing Black interests, Black political power, Black economic power has not always been about advancing all of us equally at the same time. It’s men in front, and it’s women behind, and it’s people asking queer folks, “Why are you even here?” You know what I mean? We are living through a moment that requires solidarity. And so, I want to ask, “what are the costs of us not having it?” And so that’s why I’m less concerned with writing about Frederick Douglass in this moment than his wife. That’s why I wrote about him tangentially.

Yeah, you even state outright that this poem isn’t about him. This is about the domestic work that his wife is doing.

Exactly, exactly. Because by virtue of doing what she did, she facilitated the movement in her own way. But it was also a role that was assigned. It’s not necessarily the role that she would have chosen for herself. It’s these wrinkles that I’m really interested in unraveling because if we are not fundamentally evolving beyond those scripts and those traditional patriarchal expectations of how things are supposed to work, then we’re not fundamentally recreating the world in the way that we say we are. 

Yeah.

So I want to be attuned to that, and I want to understand that there are material costs to people, spiritual costs to people, emotional costs to people that come along with that truth, that get overlooked. I don’t want people to have to pay those costs anymore. If I’m being 100% true to what I profess to believe in, that is a prerequisite, that is an imperative. And so, I needed to bring some of that into this book just as much as I needed some of the Black prophetics of a Dr. King or Malcolm X. I needed that too, you know?

No, yeah, and I think that’s part of what made this book so powerful to me, that it’s not only pointing at America or American foundational documents and saying, “look at all these ways you screwed up.” But it’s also looking inward.  There’s even a section called “Sometimes it be your own people.” So I think that made it feel like the book had so much more depth and awareness.

I also like that you’re talking about this idea of centering marginal folks in different ways. One poem that I think did that really well was “It’s Important I Remember That Orange Is The New Black–” which is a poetic analysis of the show in its title. And I completely agree with your read of that show. Like, if it were all about Piper, the show would have sucked, right?

Yeah, it would have been terrible. 

Who would have wanted to watch that? 

Nobody.

You put a lot of emphasis on how, even though it’s a story about a white protagonist, she is really just a means of smuggling in the backstories of “the colorful cast: black stories and lack stories.” It’s also a poem that thinks about color in a lot of ways, the orange of the jumpsuit in juxtaposition to the Black of high fashion, which “slims you to nothingness.” Can you say a bit more about this poem and its thoughts on incarceration and visibility?

Yeah, yeah, you know, and you can see that maybe with what you’ve referenced in “On Recidivism” earlier in our conversation. So these are not new grounds for me to cover, but what I was interested in here was how Orange Is The New Black could operate as a vehicle for understanding. Just given people being familiar with the show, having been such a recent success and pop culture phenomenon. I was like, “Oh, that’s a lens that will be pretty accessible to people.” Because people have watched the show, maybe people have already been primed to think differently about incarceration. One of the things that I was always drawn to about that show and the women who were in that facility is that there wasn’t really anyone who you would look at and say, “That’s a bad person.” Like, this is someone who was in a bad circumstance, and those circumstances are often structural.

True. 

It’s the fact that they come from environments of great strife or they don’t have the necessary support to navigate the turbulences of their life, and so they end up making the “wrong” choice at a certain point in time, or they just have bad luck. They end up in the wrong place at the wrong time, and suddenly they’re incarcerated, and because of how we’ve been programmed to think about what a prison is, we immediately write them off as “bad,” or unsalvageable. That’s just not true. Obviously, it’s inhumane. I don’t think I have to really expound on that part, but it’s just a fundamentally flawed way of thinking about any person or group of people in society. Because it’s the structure that’s the problem. 

Yeah. And you’ve done prison writing workshops yourself, I believe.

Yes, that’s true.

Can you talk about that experience and whether the show felt true to it, where, like you’re saying, you get to know folks, or you see their circumstances and are forced to empathize in a way that you normally wouldn’t or that you’ve been trained not to?

The success of the show, from my vantage point, was that it so deeply humanizes people who otherwise are dehumanized. In our everyday life, we don’t think of these people who are locked up as existing. In that respect, being in person, in the flesh, talking, fellowshipping with folks who are incarcerated, who are on the other side, and being able to be as regular with them as I am with anybody else: That’s what makes you realize how messed up all of this truly is, right? And so I do think the show was successful in that regard, because it did actually treat its characters, its subjects, as full-fledged, fully realized, multi-dimensional human beings. 

For sure.

And I’m not saying the writing is perfect. I’m not saying that certain things don’t have issues if someone wants to come at me later for something like that.

Yeah, you’re never going to have an absolutely perfect representation.

Exactly, exactly. But I appreciated the clear intention behind it. And so in that respect, it does feel very much like what my experiences in those spaces at different points were.

Yeah, and when you’re in those spaces, does it give you a sense of what writing means to that population? Like how it’s going to benefit their lives, or even, like you mentioned in “On Recidivism,” how it might impart them with some of the privileges you have.

 The writing might be the reason for the convening of the group, but ultimately, what I realized I was bringing to them was just being someone showing up as a person that sees you. And in their situations, I think that’s the most valuable thing I could bring. The writing can be a way to pass the time. For some, it can be a deeper thing. It can become a way to basically assert one’s self against the world. And there are those that take to it, maybe for reasons along those lines. You know, like, “I’m here, I’m here, you can’t ignore me, you can’t erase me.” It might be more of a shout for some, it might be more of a whisper for others, or a chance to do some interrogation of the self and their circumstances in a way that maybe they’re unaccustomed to, or not feeling safe enough to do with others, especially in that type of environment. It can mean different things to different people, but I just knew, fundamentally, the greatest thing I could bring past the metal detectors was my presence. Like, we’ll just be here together. We’re going to learn about each other. We’re going to share some things. We’re going to have real moments. That’s the way I looked at it.

That’s such a great way to describe the value of what you brought them!

Some of my favorite poems in this collection reflect on how Blackness is depicted in film and television, critiquing tiresome tropes and celebrating stories that expand representation or renew the imagination. This happens in your poem about the Obamas going to see Do the Right Thing on their first date. 

Yeah. 

In “It’s Important I Remember That The Final Scene in Django Unchained Is The Destruction of Candyland—,” you express a complicated ambivalence about Tarantino’s film, enjoying its cathartic final scene as you slurp on a Coca-Cola, but also reflecting on the director’s penchant for using the n-word gratuitously and how the protagonist “still had to play a slave” before being able to ride off victoriously with Kerry Washington. This made me think back to how film itself originated as a white supremacist tool, the first broadly distributed film with continuity editing being Birth of a Nation, a story that mythologizes the Ku Klux Klan as heroes while denigrating Black Americans as vicious and animalistic. Woodrow Wilson, whom you rightly call a “super-duper racist,” actually projected it in the White House and praised the film as “history written in lightning.” That notion of historic veracity stuck around and made racist depictions like this one even more harmful. Is the history of the medium of film something you thought about as you were writing poems like this one? 

 Film is kind of central, I guess, within this collection, where I really focus my attention towards it. But any type of visual media, I think this applies to, because, especially in our mass media environment today, it is the canvas for all types of propaganda.

There’s no shortage of it.

Yeah, all types of misteaching, all types of misleading. And so, interrogating it, and understanding that it, too, is a form that has a history, and is something that has been employed to convey certain ideas and circulate them and embed them and water them and watch them seed and grow, that’s hard for me not to at least give a little bit of time to that. Because we are a culture that consumes it so much as our primary form of entertainment. I like to think about it actively in the sense of: What is someone taking from this viewing? What are the things that they’re learning from it? I want to examine the things that are said explicitly versus the things that are said through implication. Because implication is the sneaky one. 

Yeah, yeah.

It’s the one that gets in your system without you realizing it, and before you know it, you’re ready to storm the Capitol. I treat it very seriously because, on balance, I find, collectively, we don’t treat it seriously enough. So I just wanted to provide a little bit of counterweight to it.

I feel like the Obama poem is actually a good example of that as well. It’s a poem that’s kind of complicated in its setup. You have the film, their response to the film, and then you have an analysis of their response. So it’s like this three-way thing that’s going on. The disjunctive form felt appropriate for it because it creates a lot of space, and it allows for a discussion of silence and what is unsaid, or what happens, maybe, between frames or between scenes, or when famous figures are out of the spotlight. Besides learning that that was the Obamas’ first date, which is a really interesting tidbit, what made this a compelling subject to write about?

 You know, it’s because I knew at some point in this collection I had to do some writing about Obama. Like Obama, as a now-historical figure in American history, plays a lot of different roles. The first Black person to occupy the White House. Not only a Black person himself, but married to a Black woman living and raising Black children in the White House. And this immediately follows what many historians and much of the public would have called a disastrous presidency for George W. Bush… but then is followed by the presidency of Donald Trump. Obama’s someone who comes in with a great deal of public optimism about their candidacy and what they’ll be able to do with the office, but then is constrained constantly by a very fierce and rabid and I would describe as just straight-up racist opposition. There is also an inflexibility of his own politics in certain respects, at a time when bubbling beneath the surface, you have the rise of Black Lives Matter, you have these ruptures in public life that are directly related to the country’s original sins while a Black person is technically at the helm of it.

In some ways, he was the most powerful person in the land, and in other ways, he felt oddly constrained, because when you see the person who follows him, you see what unrestrained power is. But unrestrained power isn’t for Black people. We can’t have that. So there’s a lot of deeply interesting things to think about with Obama as a subject. What I decided to focus on was thinking about the fact that this was their first official date, and about what happens in Do The Right Thing. Meditating on the death of Radio Raheem, and thinking about the racial tensions that percolate and blow up in the film, right, with Mookie finally throwing the trash can through the window of the pizzeria. 

Yeah.

And thinking about how a younger Obama probably sees that scene and directly identifies with the rage and the inevitability of it. But an Obama later on in life would be the person saying, “Don’t throw that trash can through the window.” You know what I mean? And so it’s that, it’s the course of that development, and how rising in political power, formal governmental power, is also the thing that maybe distances him from what’s happening on the streets. When it’s a younger generation, the way he used to be, who are saying we can’t stand for this, nothing is changing. We need more, we need more action, we need more responsiveness.

And maybe they don’t think about what he had to do to get to that position?

Exactly. But also not even agreeing that was the right way to go.

Yeah, yeah.

That’s his mindset, right? I knew I had to include that because so many of the types of fractures that I was speaking about feel enveloped in that. In some respects, I’m making a stance in a subtle way that I don’t know if that is the path forward. I mean, electoral politics, at least not in and of themselves. I think they play an important role, but it is still the furtherance of a system that I think we’re fundamentally trying to dismantle in favor of building something better. Obama is the one figure that allows a lot of that tension to come through very clearly because of his unique position in American history. 

I love the way you describe that, because it makes me think back to your previous book, Doppelgangbanger, which had so much about splitting and needing various selves to operate within America’s structures. And, like Obama, you’re from the Chicago area and someone who’s moved between different neighborhoods and social networks, so you definitely would have a unique window into his thinking.

Yeah, I got to watch his whole rise up close. So I knew he was going to be in the book somewhere, and I just had to think about the right way to deploy him. 

One other poem that I felt I had to bring up at some point was “It’s Important I Remember That A Tank Has Never Stopped a Lyric—” which is such a beautiful meditation on the power and continuing relevance of poetry. It feels appropriate that it comes after some of Lorca’s quotes on his concept of duende, which is this mysterious earthly power that can inhabit art and emanates out of an awareness of death. In it, you present poetry as a place of radical transformation, where bullets can be spit out like “sunflower seeds” and language becomes unassailable, “something that no soldier or assassin can assign death.” It ends with the line: “A body is a body; a body of work is so much more.” Could you talk a little bit about what you want to leave behind with your body of work? Like, if folks are going to pick up on what you’ve written so far, what would you feel is most important for them to carry on?

That’s a great question and I really appreciate you asking it. It’s one I’m still in the process of answering truthfully with every new thing that I’m composing. I’m probably slightly tweaking or revising the answer in some respect, but what I would say at this moment in time is that I’m someone who is writing with a very clear and understood positionality of themselves in the world, and despite the limitations of that is trying to write to others in the world such that we can begin getting beyond those elements of identity that drastically determine or alter the experiences we have in life. I’m writing from my position because it’s the most authentic way to approach the subject. It’s the one language that I have. It’s the life I know best. But my thought is, if I practice in such a way, there are other people practicing in such a way, coming from different places in life, different places in the world. And I thought about that a lot in the writing of this book, because I was like, “No, it’s going to be clear that I’m writing a very Black book.” Because again, I am coming out of those traditions, I’m coming out of that history. But, I know a whole lot of indigenous folks that can write something that spiritually is a sibling to this.

Yeah.

It would look completely different, but it is just as necessary. Everything that I’ve published so far, I feel, is animated by that belief of necessity, and I think if you read across the work, that’s something coming through regardless of how the subjects might change, or the contents might vary. I do think that is a thread that is running through everything. It’s more of an ethos, you know what I mean? And because I’m decidedly writing from that place, I think whatever I produce is going to bear some discernible relationship to it.

Yeah, and that’s so similar to what Lorca’s getting at with duende, right? Like, carrying something past the self, having mortality in mind, but also not succumbing to it.

Exactly, exactly. Yeah, and if I leave a volume of work behind that makes people feel that way, then they can do the same thing or start reaching toward other people in that type of way, and that would make me beyond proud. Like, that’d be a dream come true.

Interview Posted: June 9, 2026