Review by New York Times Review
how wide is the gulf between the realities of black lives and their representation in American popular culture, which overwhelmingly emphasizes white narratives? "Privilege is asking other people / to look at you," Morgan Parker writes in her third poetry collection, "Magical Negro," a work that explores the gap between black experience and the white imagination's version of it. In the popular canon the trope of the "magical Negro" is a black character who turns up exclusively to aid, often through uncanny wisdom, a white character. To say that Parker seeks to reclaim these characters oversimplifies the book's tense negotiations of pop culture, systemic racism and black womanhood. Rather, "Magical Negro" highlights the white imagination's more subtle violences, especially those that wear a smile and extend a hand in the name of charity or diversity, all to depict white people as a tolerant majority. Parker confronts this display of inclusionary rhetoric in a poem called " 'Now More Than Ever,' " defining the title phrase as something whites say "to express their surprise / and disapproval of social or political conditions which, / to the Negro, are devastatingly usual." The poem suggests that the phrase is used patronizingly, "accompanied by a solicitation for unpaid / labor from the Negro": often in the form of time, art, or an intimate and lengthy explanation of the Negro's life experiences, likely not dissimilar to a narrative the Negro has relayed before to dead ears. Parker carries forward this concern about free labor and the commodification of minority experience from her previous collection, "There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé," in which she wrote that "art is nice but the question is how are you / making money are you for sale." Her audience here is not the white reader who seeks to experience - and therefore tokenize, exoticize and commodify - "the other." That's not to say white readers shouldn't read this collection; in fact, I'dargue they should seek it out, if only to push whiteness to the edges of their reading lives. It's imperative, however, that we acknowledge the line between readership (who reads) and audience (for whom the text was written). While some of Parker's poems ironically posit themselves as "guides" to black culture, the collection, by and large, provides a space to celebrate black excellence and black joy as well as to commiserate about injustice. "My body is an argument I did not start," Parker writes, centering her particular experiences as a black woman in a way that calls to mind June Jordan or Robin Coste Lewis. Throughout Parker's collection, we see the paradoxical invisibility and hypervisibility of black women, as with "Magical Negro #3: The Strong Black Woman," whose title character is sexualized to the point that the speaker suggests assaulting her, then says, "She / won't feel nothing." The Strong Black Woman is hypervisible in her sexuality but invisible when someone abuses her. "I worry sometimes / I will only be allowed a death story," Parker confides later. This fear is charged by the accounts of racist violence and police brutality in other poems. Parker challenges us to be careful with our language, especially regarding the deaths of black people. In "Magical Negro #84: The Black Body," she writes: The body is a person. The body is a person. The body is a person. The body is a person. The body is a person. So often "the black body" is used in shorthand to talk about the direct object of violence, but the phrase distorts, even erases the humanity of the victims and survivors. Through repetition, Parker rejects this erasure. (Elsewhere, she uses repetition to reflect unchanging history: '"Now More Than Ever' " ends with "it would appear that the Negro must / live the life of the Negro, ever, now and ever" before repeating "and ever" over 180 times.) Parker is a dynamic craftsperson whose associative thinking complicates traditional confessional approaches. She often uses short, unadorned statements, but uses them _ to portray a seemingly unassuming speaker whose complexity is revealed through deft line breaks. "Who Were Frederick Douglass's Cousins, and Other Quotidian Black History Facts That I Wish I Learned in School" begins: I have a body. It sits in a desk. Every day is bitten with new guilt. My teacher can see right through me, all the way to Black History Month. The first three statements provide us with the setting, as well as the speaker's deep awareness of her body's vulnerability and her emotional life. The fourth sentence, which begins the third line, uses line breaks to say more than one thing at once: "My teacher can see right" - that is, the teacher has insight deemed "correct" by society; "My teacher can see right through me, all the way," meaning that the teacher can see through any facade, self-protective or otherwise, the speaker projects; and then "My teacher can see right through me, all the way to Black History Month," meaning that the teacher only sees the black speaker's relevance one month out of the year. This collection further evidences Morgan Parker's considerable consequence in American poetry, especially in the way that it demonstrates her skill of nuance. Don't be fooled by the collection's candor into thinking that these poems are all surface. Subtext and allusion abounds in this text, in part because Parker's dizzying associative leaps reject a hierarchy of "poetic" subject matter, recognizing that "everything is urgent." Especially the poems of Morgan Parker. EMILIA PHILLIPS is the author of three poetry collections, most recently "Empty Clip."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 23, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
As in her last book of poetry, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé (2017), Parker again deconstructs a pantheon of popular Black icons, this time through a disconnected cycle of Magical Negro poems. While sending up celebrities in Diana Ross Finishing a Rib in Alabama and Michael Jackson in Blackface on a Date with Tatum O'Neal, Parker also draws a somber lineage through ostensibly superficial similarities: The gap in James Baldwin's teeth speaks to the gap in Malcolm X's teeth. The result is a profound meditation on the history and future of Black liberation. From a schoolchild's concerns ( How can I concentrate / on photosynthesis when / there is a thing called Africa ) to the problematic implications of the increasingly popular invocation, now more than ever, which, when uttered by the most politically liberal but socially comfortable of Whites, translates into, I straight up did not believe you before. A searing indictment, an irreverent lampoon, and a desperately urgent work of poetry, to be read alongside the work of Eve L. Ewing, Tiana Clark, and Nicole Sealey.--Diego Báez Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
As witnessed in this third collection, blackness cannot be confined to a simple definition. Parker writes of the black experience not as an antidote or opposite to whiteness, but a culture and community where irreplicable nuances are created in spite of, not because of, pain and trauma. Blackness cannot be bought or sold; it's an inheritance. For example, in "Magical Negro #607: Gladys Knight on the 200th Episode of The Jeffersons," Parker writes, "When I'm rich I will still be Black./ You can't take the girl out of the ghetto/ until she earns it, or grows up into it." Similarly, in "The History of Black People," Parker frames the legacy of black people as "an investigation" and "a tragicomic horror film" and "joy stinging pink lips." Parker uses personal narratives to deconstruct societal stereotypes of black womanhood. In "When a Man I Love Jerks Off in My Bed next to Me and Falls Asleep," she observes, "When I walk into the world and know/ I am a black girl, I understand/ I am a costume. I know the rules./ I like the pain because it makes me." (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
