Magical Negro

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(as of Apr 13, 2026 20:11:46 UTC – Details)

A National Book Critics Circle Poetry Award Winner!

“Morgan Parker’s latest collection is a riveting testimony to everyday blackness . . . It is wry and atmospheric, an epic work of aural pleasures and personifications that demands to be read―both as an account of a private life and as searing political protest.” ―TIME Magazine

A Best Book of 2019 at TIME, Elle, BuzzFeed, Star Tribune, AVClub, and more.

A Most Anticipated Book of 2019 at Vogue, O: the Oprah Magazine, NYLON, BuzzFeed, Publishers Weekly, and more.

From the breakout author of There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé comes a profound and deceptively funny exploration of Black American womanhood.

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.

From the Publisher

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Tin House
Publication date ‏ : ‎ February 5, 2019
Edition ‏ : ‎ First Edition
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Print length ‏ : ‎ 112 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1947793187
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1947793187
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 5.6 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.56 x 0.32 x 8.56 inches
Best Sellers Rank: #219,761 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #133 in Black & African American Poetry (Books) #175 in Death, Grief & Loss Poetry (Books) #446 in Poetry by Women
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