Morgan PARKER: There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé

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 intersections 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 déjà 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.

Morgan Parker is the author of Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night (Switchback Books 2015), selected by Eileen Myles for the 2013 Gatewood Prize.

Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in numerous publications, as well as anthologized in Why I Am Not A Painter (Argos Books), The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop (Haymarket Books), and Best American Poetry 2016.

Winner of a 2016 Pushcart Prize and a Cave Canem graduate fellow, Morgan lives with her dog, Braeburn, in Brooklyn, New York. She works as an editor for Little A and Day One, co-curates the Poets With Attitude (PWA) reading series with Tommy Pico, and with poet Angel Nafis, she is The Other Black Girl Collective.

A TIME Magazine Best Paperback of 2017
A Paris Review Staff Pick
A Publishers Weekly Pick of the Week
A Buzzfeed “Most Exciting Book of 2017”
A VICE Most Anticipated Book
NPR.org’s “Poetry to Pay Attention To”

“[A] tremendous new collection.” VICE

Morgan Parker
There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé
Tin House Publisher
ISBN 978-1-941040-53-9
paperback, 96p,
2017, $14.95

fleursdumal.nl magazine

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