These exquisite poems defy categorization.' The New Yorker The only thing more beautiful than Beyonc is God, and God is a black woman sipping ros and. She invokes one of the most famous opening lines in American music - Gershwin’s “Summertime, and the living is easy” - a cultural script so powerful that, even without music, even as just words on a page, our internal orchestras automatically swell, and we hear the mournful crooning of Billie Holiday or Sam Cooke or Janis Joplin or Billy Stewart or Bradley Nowell of the band Sublime - whichever version you happen to know best. A TIME Magazine Best Paperback of 2017 One of Oprah Magazine's 'Ten Best Books of 2017' 'This singular poetry collection is a dynamic meditation on the experience of, and societal narratives surrounding, contemporary black womanhood. In her poem “The Book of Negroes,” Morgan Parker hits us with a nasty crossover in the very first sentence. Great art is always, if you will, breaking your mind’s ankles. It’s the same trick as a crossover dribble. The artist sets your mind on a well-worn road, and then, just as you settle into that automatic groove, yanks you suddenly in another direction. One trick of art is to constantly invoke - and then manipulate and complicate - these familiar mental scripts. To be a part of that culture means that it only takes a few words, the tiniest head fake, to set your mind racing along a familiar track. Parker, a poet and an editor, is also the author of “Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night.”Įvery culture is a vast carpet of interwoven references: clichés, fables, jingles, lullabies, warnings, jokes, memes. From Morgan Parker’s “There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé” (Tin House Books, 2017, ). ‘Summertime and the living is extraordinarily difficult.’
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