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Magical Negro
Magical Negro | Morgan Parker
13 posts | 14 read | 17 to read
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.
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Pinta
Magical Negro | Morgan Parker
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Pickpick

Killer TITLES to these poems (re “Ode to Fried Chicken‘s Appearance on Scandal,” “Why the Jive Bird Sings,” “Two White Girls in the African Braid Shop on Marcy and Fulton”). Prose poems are faves, the insistent, sometimes rambling arguments on Black bodies, female desire, art and resistance, bad moods. Playing with form (tests, investigations, questionnaires). P90 “The gap in Angela Davis‘s teeth speaks to the gap in James Baldwin‘s teeth.” 2019

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Bertha_Mason
Magical Negro | Morgan Parker

"It is possible that in the dark slumbering of their unconscious, the White imagines that the only remedy for fear is death."
-"Toward a New Theory of Negro Propaganda"

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Bertha_Mason
Magical Negro | Morgan Parker

"For example, the Negro obviously understands how the talking heads of reality TV stars are essentially a manifested rendering of the Greek chorus; how fault is assembled episode by episode; how it matters who gets named what."
-"Toward a New Theory of Negro Propaganda"

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Bertha_Mason
Magical Negro | Morgan Parker

"My body is an argument I didn't start."
-"And Cold Sunset"

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WanderingBookaneer
Magical Negro | Morgan Parker
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WanderingBookaneer
Magical Negro | Morgan Parker
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amma-keep-reading
Magical Negro | Morgan Parker
Pickpick

My favorite of her collections.

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megnews
Magical Negro | Morgan Parker
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Panpan

This started out with a bang and quickly fizzled out for me. I‘d put it between a pan and a so-so.

Book 126/165 4/9/19

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ErikasMindfulShelf
Magical Negro | Morgan Parker
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Started off a little rough for me, but ended up liking a lot of the poems.

megnews Just finished this one. I was the opposite. Liked it at the start and downhill from there. 5y
50 likes1 comment
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WhatDeeReads
Magical Negro | Morgan Parker
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Pickpick

Friday afternoon read.

I keep reading volumes of poetry because I know that the key to understanding is exposure. I‘m sure I didn‘t grasp everything Morgan Parker is saying but what I did grasp made it worth the read.

Even her acknowledgments are beautiful and lyrical.

Magical Negro #80: Brooklyn literally took my breath away.

Before you tell me: the first volume is already on hold at the library.

Weaponxgirl Damnit! I was gonna ask how this compared to her first volume! 😁 5y
BellaBookNook I need to try more too! I get frustrated when I know I‘m not getting it. (edited) 5y
WhatDeeReads @Weaponxgirl I liked this volume much better than her second. I‘ve read them both now. 5y
38 likes1 stack add3 comments
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Thndrstd
Magical Negro | Morgan Parker
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Pickpick

Through the lenses of pop culture, hip hop, and black history, Morgan Parker delivers a devastating series of poems about the current state of affairs for Black Americans. While there is humor in it, the humor is black and always sets the reader on edge. A powerful, disturbing, and important collection.

[I received an advanced e-galley of this book through #Netgalley. It is due to be released February 5, 2019.]

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TheNextBook
Magical Negro | Morgan Parker
Mehso-so

This was interesting. Some of the poems I really liked. Some of them were just okay. Some of them really resonated. Some of them didnt. It‘s a short collection.

Thank you Netgalley, for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

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shutupsmalls
Magical Negro | Morgan Parker

Since I thought I‘d be dead
by now everything
I do is fucking perfect walking wreck
reckless