Search results for ""Author Morgan Parker""

From the author of Magical Negro, Winner of the National Book Critic's Circle Award'Hilarious and hard-hitting . . . it ripples with energy, insight, and searing music' Tracy K. Smith, author of Wade in the WaterOther People's Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night - the book that launched the career of one of our most important young American poets - is now in print for the first time in the UK, featuring a new introduction from Danez Smith.The debut collection from award-winning poet Morgan Parker demonstrates why she's become one of the most beloved writers working today. Her command of language is on full display. Parker bobs and weaves between humor and pathos, grief and anxiety, Gwendolyn Brooks and Jay-Z, the New York School and reality television. She collapses any foolish distinctions between the personal and the political, the 'high' and the 'low'. Other People's Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night not only introduced an essential new voice to the world, it contains everything readers have come to love about Morgan Parker's work.

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'Unflinchingly irreverent, laugh out loud funny and heartbreakingly honest' Elizabeth Acevedo, bestselling author of The Poet X'Morgan Parker put this song on - and I hope it never turns off' Nic Stone, bestselling author of Dear MartinWHEN THE WORLD SAYS FIT IN, ASK WHYTrapped in sunny, stifling, small-town suburbia, seventeen-year-old Morgan knows why she's in therapy. She can't count the number of times she's been the only non-white person at the sleepover, been teased for her "weird" outfits, and been told she's not "really" black. Also, she's spent most of her summer crying in bed. So there's that, too.Lately, it feels like the whole world is listening to the same terrible track on repeat - and it's telling them how to feel, who to vote for, what to believe. Morgan wonders, when can she turn this song off and begin living for herself?Life may be a never-ending hamster wheel of agony, but Morgan finds her crew of fellow outcasts, blasts music like there's no tomorrow, discovers what being black means to her, and finally puts her mental health first. She decides that, no matter what, she will always be intense, ridiculous, passionate, and sometimes hilarious. After all, darkness doesn't have to be a bad thing. Darkness is just real.Loosely based on her own teenage life and diaries, Morgan Parker's WHO PUT THIS SONG ON? is an outstanding debut, full of courage, generosity and reasons to live.

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'To read MAGICAL NEGRO it is to wonder what each poem will do next, and to be reminded, over and over, of Parker's extraordinary lyric gifts' Meghan O'RourkeMAGICAL 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.

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Publishers Weekly's Ten Best Poetry Collections of Spring A Most Anticipated book at Buzzfeed, NYLON and Bustle One of i-D's emerging female authors to read in 2017 'Outstanding collection of poems. So much soul. So much intelligence in how Parker folds in cultural references and the experiences of black womanhood. Every poem will get its hooks into you. And of course, the poems about Beyonce are the greatest because Beyonce is our queen.' Roxane Gay 'I can and have read Morgan Parker's poems over and over ...She writes history and pleasure and kitsch and abstraction, then vanishes like a god in about 13 inches.' Eileen Myles 'Morgan Parker has a mind like wildfire and these pages are lit. I can't recall being this enthralled, entertained, and made alert by a book in a very long time.' Jami Attenberg The only thing more beautiful than Beyonce is God, and God is a black woman sipping rose and drawing a lavender bath, texting her mom, belly-laughing in the therapist's office, feeling unloved, being on display, daring to survive. Morgan Parker stands at the intersections of vulnerability and performance, of desire and disgust, of tragedy and excellence. Unrelentingly feminist, tender, ruthless and sequinned, these poems are an altar to the complexities of black American womanhood in an age of non-indictments and deja vu, and a time of wars over bodies and power. These poems celebrate and mourn. They are a chorus chanting: You're gonna give us the love we need.

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