Magical Negro

by Morgan Parker

Overview

A National Book Critics Circle Poetry Award Winner!

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

"Morgan Parker's latest collection is 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

A Best Book of 2019 at TIME, Elle, BuzzFeed, the Star Tribune, AVClub, and more.

A Most Anticipated Book of 2019 at Vogue, O: the Oprah Magazine, NYLON, BuzzFeed, Publishers Weekly, and more.

Magical Negro is an archive of black everydayness, a catalog of contemporary folk heroes, an ethnography of ancestral grief, and an inventory of figureheads, idioms, and customs. These American 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 and troubling 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, 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781947793187
Publisher:	Tin House Books
Publication date:	02/05/2019
Pages:	112
Sales rank:	309,715
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Morgan Parker is a poet, essayist, and novelist. She is the author of the young adult novel Who Put This Song On?; and the poetry collections Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night, and Magical Negro, which won the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award. Parker’s debut book of nonfiction is forthcoming from One World. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, winner of a Pushcart Prize, and has been hailed by The New York Times as “a dynamic craftsperson” of “considerable consequence to American poetry.”

Table of Contents

I Let Us Now Praise Famous Magical Negroes

I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background 3

Magical Negro #217: Diana Ross Finishing a Rib in Alabama, 1990s 5

Everything Will Be Taken Away 6

Magical Negro #3: The Strong Black Woman 8

The High Priestess of Soul's Sunday Morning Visit to the Wall of Respect 10

And Cold Sunset 11

Nancy Meyers and My Dream of Whiteness 12

Whites Only 15

Magical Negro #607: Gladys Knight on the 200th Episode of The Jeffersons 17

Magical Negro #84: The Black Body 20

Sammy Davis Jr. 21

Let's Get Some Better Angels at This Party 22

The History of Black People 24

II Field Negro Field Notes

Two White Girls in the African Braid Shop on Marcy and Fulton 31

"Now More Than Ever" 32

Black Women for Beginners Pt. 1 35

When a Man I Love Jerks Off in My Bed next to Me and Falls Asleep 36

Who Were Frederick Douglass's Cousins, and Other Quotidian Black History Facts That I Wish I Learned in School 38

A Brief History of the Present 40

Ode to Fried Chicken's Guest Appearance on Scandal 43

Magical Negro #1: Jesus Christ 45

Mart 46

"Lilac Wine" by Eartha Kitt vs. "Lilac Wine" Jeff Buckley 49

What I Am 50

If you are over staying woke 52

Who Speaks for the Earth? 55

Black Ego (Original Soundtrack) 57

I Told my Therapist I Tried to Meditate and She Laughed 60

"Parkers Mood" Charlie Parker 61

III Popular Negro Punchlines

Great America 65

Magical Negro #89: Michael Jackson in Blackface on a Date with Tatum O'Neal, 1970s 68

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner 70

My Sister Says White Supremacy Is Turning Her Crazy 71

We Are the House That Holds the Table at Which Yes We Will Happily Take a Goddamn Seat 72

Why the Jive Bird Sings 74

Magical Negro #80: Brooklyn 76

The Black Saint & the Sinner Lady & the Dead & the Truth 78

Preface to a Twenty Volume Joke Book 80

Toward a New Theory of Negro Propaganda 85

It was Summer Now and the Colored People Came Out into the Sunshine 90

Editorial Reviews

Parker is a dynamic craftsperson whose associative thinking complicates traditional confessional approaches. She often uses short, unadorned statements, but uses them to portray a seemingly unassuming speaker whose complexity is revealed through deft line breaks…This collection further evidences Morgan Parker's considerable consequence in American poetry, especially in the way that it demonstrates her skill of nuance. Don't be fooled by the collection's candor into thinking that these poems are all surface. Subtext and allusion abounds in this text, in part because Parker's dizzying associative leaps reject a hierarchy of "poetic" subject matter, recognizing that "everything is urgent." Especially the poems of Morgan Parker.

The New York Times Book Review - Emilia Phillips

★ 12/17/2018

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. Blackness cannot be bought or sold; it’s an inheritance. For example, in “Magical Negro #607: Gladys Knight on the 200th Episode of The Jeffersons,” Parker writes, “When I’m rich I will still be Black./ You can’t take the girl out of the ghetto/ until she earns it, or grows up into it.” Similarly, in “The History of Black People,” Parker frames the legacy of black people as “an investigation” and “a tragicomic horror film” and “joy stinging pink lips.” Parker uses personal narratives to deconstruct societal stereotypes of black womanhood. In “When a Man I Love Jerks Off in My Bed next to Me and Falls Asleep,” she observes, “When I walk into the world and know/ I am a black girl, I understand/ I am a costume. I know the rules./ I like the pain because it makes me.” (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

"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

"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."

The Washington Post

"Parker's poetry is lyrical, humorous and bold. She holds nothing back in this collection, and the reader never asks her to."

Marie Claire

"From dating white boys to imagining what Diana Ross was thinking in that famous photo where she licks her fingers after eating a pair of ribs, Parker’s second poetry collection runs the gamut. But each poem is written with her signature wry humor and caustic honesty."

BuzzFeed

"A searing indictment, an irreverent lampoon, and a desperately urgent work of poetry, to be read alongside the work of Eve L. Ewing, Tiana Clark, and Nicole Sealey."

Booklist

"Morgan Parker’s poetry is vital, in both senses of the word. Her most recent collection, There Are Things More Beautiful Than Beyoncé, was an absolute knockout—a breathtaking exploration of black womanhood, culture both pop and past, bodies, minds. Poetry’s defenders need not answer those who would sing its dirges, but if they did, Parker’s work could serve as an indisputable response."

Literary Hub

"If you're anxious for your snug perspective to be rattled and ripped asunder, for the predictable landscape you stroll to become all but unrecognizable, for things you thought you knew to slap you into another consciousness—brethren, have I got the book for you. Bey's bestie continues her reign with this restless, fierce, and insanely inventive way of walking through the world. Once again, children—ignore Ms. Parker at your peril."

Patricia Smith

"Gives language to the seemingly unspeakable demanding no solution."

Oprah Daily - jayy dodd

"This collection further evidences Morgan Parker’s considerable consequence in American poetry."

The New York Times

"Fierce, playful and political, Parker’s poems celebrate the everyday just as they face off ancestral hurt. . . . Holding history and the contemporary to account, Magical Negro meets prejudice with an unwavering eye."

The Guardian

"Parker’s voice is surprising, ranging from elegiac to conspiratorial to ecstatic; she interrogates both blackness and femininity like ports in a long personal journey, as places to land but also as points of departure."

Vogue

"Parker’s poetry seamlessly intertwines moments of intimate introspection, euphoria, desire, and sorrow with reflections on the psychological and spiritual legacy of Black America."

Broadly

"Told with Parker’s signature lyricism and humor; her poems have the ability to soothe and to incite, she nimbly creates spaces for you to rest while reading, and let the power of her words and message sink into you like a heavy stone into water, or a hot knife through butter. It’s nothing short of triumphant."

NYLON

"Morgan Parker's latest collection is 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 - Glory Edim

"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."

T Magazine - Danez Smith

"It’s a cliché to call a work of art a conversation starter, but this book is. One could spend hours discussing not only the whole collection, but each individual poem. . . . Dizzyingly interdisciplinary . . . A book that delights and astonishes even as it interrogates."

The Los Angeles Review of Books