Magical negro : poems / Morgan Parker.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Parker, Morgan, author.

Standardized Title:

Poems. Selections

Language:

English

Genre:

Poetry.

Physical Description:

pages cm

Edition:

First U.S. edition.

Place of Publication:

Portland, Oregon : Tin House Books, 2018.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

I Let Us Now Praise Famous Magical Negroes

I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background p. 3

Magical Negro #217: Diana Ross Finishing a Rib in Alabama, 1990s p. 5

Everything Will Be Taken Away p. 6

Magical Negro #3: The Strong Black Woman p. 8

The High Priestess of Soul's Sunday Morning Visit to the Wall of Respect p. 10

And Cold Sunset p. 11

Nancy Meyers and My Dream of Whiteness p. 12

Whites Only p. 15

Magical Negro #607: Gladys Knight on the 200th Episode of The Jeffersons p. 17

Magical Negro #84: The Black Body p. 20

Sammy Davis Jr. p. 21

Let's Get Some Better Angels at This Party p. 22

The History of Black People p. 24

II Field Negro Field Notes

Two White Girls in the African Braid Shop on Marcy and Fulton p. 31

"Now More Than Ever" p. 32

Black Women for Beginners Pt. 1 p. 35

When a Man I Love Jerks Off in My Bed next to Me and Falls Asleep p. 36

Who Were Frederick Douglass's Cousins, and Other Quotidian Black History Facts That I Wish I Learned in School p. 38

A Brief History of the Present p. 40

Ode to Fried Chicken's Guest Appearance on Scandal p. 43

Magical Negro #1: Jesus Christ p. 45

Mart p. 46

"Lilac Wine" by Eartha Kitt vs. "Lilac Wine" p. 49 / Jeff Buckley

What I Am p. 50

If you are over staying woke p. 52

Who Speaks for the Earth? p. 55

Black Ego (Original Soundtrack) p. 57

I Told my Therapist I Tried to Meditate and She Laughed p. 60

"Parkers Mood" p. 61 / Charlie Parker

III Popular Negro Punchlines

Great America p. 65

Magical Negro #89: Michael Jackson in Blackface on a Date with Tatum O'Neal, 1970s p. 68

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner p. 70

My Sister Says White Supremacy Is Turning Her Crazy p. 71

We Are the House That Holds the Table at Which Yes We Will Happily Take a Goddamn Seat p. 72

Why the Jive Bird Sings p. 74

Magical Negro #80: Brooklyn p. 76

The Black Saint & the Sinner Lady & the Dead & the Truth p. 78

Preface to a Twenty Volume Joke Book p. 80

Toward a New Theory of Negro Propaganda p. 85

It was Summer Now and the Colored People Came Out into the Sunshine p. 90.

ISBN:

9781947793187

1947793187

OCLC:

1051777996