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Magical Negro

Magical Negro

Poems

Morgan Parker
$16.95
$16.95
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From the breakout author of There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé comes a profound and deceptively funny exploration of Black American womanhood.

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.

 

Morgan Parker is the author of There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé (2017), Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night (2015), and the forthcoming poetry collection Magical Negro (2019). Her debut young adult novel Who Put This Song On? is forthcoming from Delacorte Press in late 2019, and her debut book of nonfiction will be released in 2020 by One World.
 
Parker received her Bachelors in Anthropology and Creative Writing from Columbia University and her MFA in Poetry from NYU. Her poetry and essays have been published and anthologized in numerous publications, including The Paris Review, The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, Best American Poetry 2016, The New York Times, and The Nation. Parker is the recipient of a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, winner of a 2016 Pushcart Prize, and a Cave Canem graduate fellow.
 
She is the creator and host of Reparations, Live! at the Ace Hotel. With Tommy Pico, she co-curates the Poets With Attitude (PWA) reading series, and with Angel Nafis, she is The Other Black Girl Collective. She is a Sagittarius, and she lives in Los Angeles.
 
  • Paperback: 112 pages
  • Publisher: Tin House Books (February 5, 2019)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1947793187
  • ISBN-13: 9781947793187
  • Product Dimensions: 5.6 x 0.4 x 8.6 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 2.4 ounces
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