Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night

by Morgan Parker

Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night—the book that launched the career of one of our most important young American poets—is back in print.

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.

Magical Negro

by Morgan Parker

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.

There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce

by Morgan Parker

The only thing more beautiful than Beyoncé is God,
and God is a black woman sipping rosé 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 interdivs
of vulnerability and performance, of desire and disgust,
of tragedy and excellence. Unrelentingly feminist,
tender, ruthless, and sequined, 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.