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 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.
