Morgan Parker

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.

Magical Negro

John Balek

It's been a while since I've read any poetry. This was my introduction to Morgan Parker. I felt like this collection of poems was a mixed bag. There were a handful I really enjoyed. They really gave me a valuable look into Parker's experiences as a black woman. My biggest issue was that Parker's writing style relies heavily on pop culture references. There were multiple times where references would go over my head and the impact of the poem was lost on me. I recognize this is more of a problem on my end but I've read other poetry collections in this same vein where I've felt like I had more of a complete understanding after finishing. I will definitely have to revisit this after I've looking into some of these references and read more poetry. Some of my favorite poems include: Matt, Magical Negro #80: Brooklyn, and Toward a New Theory of Negro Propaganda.

Morgan Thomas

Megan Henry

Satya Nelms

Athena Eloy

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.

Magical Negro

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