Magical Negro - Softcover

Parker, Morgan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 147215407X ISBN 13: 9781472154071

Publisher: Corsair, 2019

Synopsis

From the breakout author of There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé comes a profound and deceptively funny exploration of Black American womanhood.

'2019 justly belongs to Morgan Parker. Her poems shred me with their intelligence, dark humor and black-hearted vision. Parker is one of this generation's best minds' Danez Smith, winner of the Forward Prize

'A riveting testimony to everyday blackness . . . It is wry and atmospheric, an epic work of aural pleasures and personifications that demands to be read - both as an account of a private life and as searing political protest' TIME Magazine

Magical Negro is an archive of Black everydayness, a catalogue of contemporary folk heroes, an ethnography of ancestral grief, and an inventory of figureheads, idioms and customs. These poems are both elegy and jive, joke and declaration, songs of congregation and self-conception. They connect themes of loneliness, displacement, grief, ancestral trauma and objectification, while exploring tropes and stereotypes of Black Americans.

Focused primarily on depictions of Black womanhood alongside personal narratives, the collection tackles interior and exterior politics - of both the body and society, of both the individual and the collective experience.

In Magical Negro, Morgan Parker creates a space of witness, of airing grievances, of pointing out patterns. In these poems are living documents, pleas, latent traumas, inside jokes and unspoken anxieties situated as firmly in the past as in the present - timeless Black melancholies and triumphs.

About this title

Review

2019 justly belongs to Morgan Parker. Her poems shred me with their intelligence, dark humor and black-hearted vision. Parker is one of this generation's best minds, able to hold herself and her world, which includes all of us, up to impossible lights, revealing every last bit of our hopes, failings, possibilities and raptures. (Danez Smith, New York Times)

Fierce, playful and political . . . Holding history and the contemporary to account, Magical Negro meets prejudice with an unwavering eye. (The Guardian)

A riveting testimony to everyday blackness . . . Magical Negro's soft radiance permeates the soul, inspiring a disquieting melancholy. It is wry and atmospheric, an epic work of aural pleasures and personifications that demands to be read - both as an account of a private life and as searing political protest (Time magazine)

2019's big new poetry. Parker exposes the personal and political with such verve and confidence, it'll leave you reeling (Stylist magazine)

As witnessed in this third collection, blackness cannot be confined to a simple definition. Parker writes of the black experience not as an antidote or opposite to whiteness, but a culture and community where irreplicable nuances are created in spite of, not because of, pain and trauma . . . Parker uses personal narratives to deconstruct societal stereotypes of black womanhood. (Publishers Weekly, starred review)

Another lay-it-all-on-the-line volume of scorching verse (O Magazine)

Magical Negro is unsettlingly new: a book that incisively explores states of black womanhood with astonishing buoyancy and grief. I can't stop thinking about the songs it sings, songs that feel inevitable and yet unvoiced, complex and yet urgent; poems that are steeped in pop culture and the here-and-now of actual life while also being refracted through the darkest lens of American history. To read it is to wonder what each poem will do next, and to be reminded, over and over, of Parker's extraordinary lyric gifts. (Meghan O'Rourke)

Parker's poetry is a sledgehammer covered in silk, exposing black women's vulnerability and power and underscoring what it means to be magical and in pain. (BuzzFeed)

Morgan Parker continues to fearlessly explore what it means to be a black woman in the United States today. . . . Bold and edgy, the writing spotlights the strength and tenacity that enable the speaker to survive grief and inequity. It also gives voice to her disappointments and delights as she claims - and proclaims - agency over her body and her life (Washington Post)

Parker's poetry is a sledgehammer covered in silk, exposing black women's vulnerability and power and underscoring what it means to be magical and in pain.

(Buzzfeed)

Book Description

New collection of poems by Morgan Parker, author of There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé: 'This is a marvelous book. See for yourself. Morgan Parker is a fearlessly forward and forward-thinking literary star' TERRANCE HAYES

About this edition

• Publisher: Corsair
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 147215407X
• ISBN 13: 9781472154071
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 112