Morgan Parker (1) (1987–)

Magical Negro by Morgan Parker, the author of the widely-lauded There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce, is powerful and disturbing. A Magical Negro is is a wise one who shows up to help a white person, like the Legend of Bagger Vance. It's of course a white vision of blackness, intended to be positive but offensive to many in its white-centricity. One persistent theme in her collection is the subtle racism of whites who hold out a helping hand to show how tolerant they are, while still show more viewing and treating blacks as lesser, or simply being irritatingly facile. "Now more than ever" is:

"a phrase used by Whites to express their surprise and disapproval of social or political conditions which, to, the Negro, are devastatingly usual. Often accompanied by an unsolicited touch on the forearm or shoulder, this expression is a favorite among the most politically liberal but socially comfortable of Whites. Its origins and implications are necessarily vague and undefined."

She dates white men on occasion, and is funny and self-sarcastic about that. She trains her scathing eye on herself as much as the rest of us.

"The Impressionism wing strikes me as too
dainty for my mood, except for one oil painting
by Gustave Caillebotte, Calf ’s Head and Ox Tongue,
which is described in the wall text as
“visually unpleasant.” A bust of an African woman
bums me out. This year, I cried
at everyone’s kitchen table,
I spit on the street and was late on purpose and stepped
in glass and my dog died and I saw
minuses over and over. I’ll figure it out.
I let a man walk away and then
another one. It has taken me exactly this long
to realize I could have done something else.
I’m being repetitive now but do you ever
hate yourself?"

She also celebrates black excellence and the joy of being black, even in an often-hostile world. I was strongly affected by all she had to say about gender and race, and the intelligence she brings to bear. This is one of my favorite collections this year. show less

I loved Magical Negro so much that I was both excited to read this collection but also anxious that I would come to it with expectations too high and be let down, but I absolutely loved this.

THESE POEMS ARE SO GOOD. Bristling with righteous anger, and pride, and grief, and culture, and wit, and knowing, and precision. For a collection that name checks Nikki Giovanni (in "13 Ways of Looking at a Black Girl"), it suddenly occurs to me that there is a lot of echoing/embodying "Ego-Tripping" show more here, though I can't imagine Giovanni as comfortable dipping into occasional vulgarity.

This collection calls all of us out (even the poet) and all of us back in. There are no wasted words, no vague poeticisms -- Parker wants you to know just what she means.

Morgan Parker is easily one of my top-five favorite poets writing today. show less

Alternatingly self-deprecating and righteous, Parker chronicles the uneasy contradictions of her childhood, the success and imposter syndrome of her adulthood, and the sequence of therapists and medications she has tried to use to navigate both. Smart and funny and irrefutable. I couldn't put this one down, even though Parker is tackling the racism and history of racism that undergirds every aspect of our society.

As a white person, my media consumption has been pretty limited to white creators and white stories. I got my BA in literature and we learned almost exclusively about white (cis male) authors. Honestly, it's boring. So I've been branching out and trying to listen to voices that are vastly different from mine. I want to learn about the world in the capacity it actually exists and not in the way we've been made to believe. Morgan Parker is not afraid to throw the truth in your face. She is not show more here to accommodate your feelings. She's quick, witty, and hilarious. Her images are concrete, and honestly just feel like a punch in the face. There are times when I relate to her, I feel her pain, and times when I may not have experienced what she went through, but she made me feel it anyway. She forces you to look at the world from her eyes and see how you've been wrong, and she makes you laugh along the way. show less