Magical Negro

Poems

De: Morgan Parker

Narrado por: Morgan Parker

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.

©2019 Morgan Parker (P)2019 Audible, Inc.

a unique way to convey a mass truth

i wasn’t expecting this book to be written in such a free form, but i enjoyed it.

Waste of time

I literally want to know what Morgan Parker is talking about. This melancholy collage of non essentially utterances was anything but magical. Extremely disappointing and not a good use of time.

Poems not seen

So this listening to books is new to me and listening to these poems felt awkward. I often wanted to do what I do when I read poetry, which is go over the lines again to catch the meaning. That seemed out of order, although I guess I could rewind....

There was a randomness to the poems. Sometimes I was not sure when one ended and another began. Sometimes the poems were a list. This made me want to see the text....

Part of my problem might be that I listen to more rap than poetry and this was not very musical; or lyrical for that matter. I still want to give the text a read to see if it will strike me differently.

I usually like her poems

I struggled with this book. I am not sure what it was but, I could not grasp her writing in this one.