Morgan Parker's Magical Negro Reviewed at LARB

Kathleen Rooney reviews Morgan Parker's new book, Magical Negro (Tin House, 2019), for Los Angeles Review of Books. "Parker knows how to make the contents of each of her projects deliver on the promise of the words on their covers," writes Rooney. "In this case, 'magical' is a term that is elevating but also objectifying, even dehumanizing, and the archaism of 'Negro' gives the reader pause." More:

...The vexatious flatness and near-comedy of such a taxonomic title serves as the perfect frame for Parker’s vibrant, angry, and idiosyncratic exploration of politics, black history, black womanhood, hip-hop, popular culture, celebrity, and more.

Parker has said in interviews that she considers this book “more raw” than her previous collections, and that it draws upon her study of anthropology in college. Fittingly, the book operates in part as a quasi-ethnography, taking that tack of a scientific description of the customs of individual people and cultures and filtering it through the sensibility of a poet at the height of her powers of description and perception. Such poems as “Magical Negro #607: Gladys Knight on the 200th Episode of The Jeffersons” and “Who Were Frederick Douglass’s Cousins, and Other Quotidian Black History Facts That I Wish I Learned in School,” among many others, hold familiar figures up to new scrutiny, inviting readers to consider and then reconsider what they think they already know and what they might still have left to learn.

Learning seems to be a big concern of this book...

Read on at LARB.