The Cut spoke with Parker about pop culture, the complexities of black femininity, and why she’s determined to create poetry that reflects her own experience.
With lines like “I try to write a text message to describe my feelings but the emoticon hands are all white” (These Are Dangerous Times, Man) or “When I drink anything out of a martini glass I feel untouched by professional and sexual rejection” (Another Another Autumn in New York) and “I am exclusively post-everything” (Poem on Beyonce’s Birthday), Parker deploys Beyonce’s voice to probe themes of sex, isolation, erasure and depression. They are a chorus chanting: You’re gonna give us the love we need.Things Morgan Parker thinks are more beautiful than Beyoncé: “self-awareness,” “leftover mascara in clumps,” and “the fucking sky.” Which is not to say that Parker finds her uninteresting throughout her latest collection, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, the 28-year-old poet uses one of the world’s most famous entertainers as a device to explore what it means to be a black woman in America today. Unrelentingly feminist, tender, ruthless and sequinned, 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.
Morgan Parker stands at the intersections of vulnerability and performance, of desire and disgust, of tragedy and excellence. 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. I can’t recall being this enthralled, entertained, and made alert by a book in a very long time.’ Jami Attenberg ‘Morgan Parker has a mind like wildfire and these pages are lit. She writes history and pleasure and kitsch and abstraction, then vanishes like a god in about 13 inches.’ Eileen Myles ‘I can and have read Morgan Parker’s poems over and over. And of course, the poems about Beyoncé are the greatest because Beyoncé is our queen.’ Roxane Gay So much intelligence in how Parker folds in cultural references and the experiences of black womanhood. One of i-D’s emerging female authors to read in 2017 Publishers Weekly ‘s Ten Best Poetry Collections of SpringĪ Most Anticipated book at Buzzfeed, NYLON and Bustle One of Oprah Magazine’s Ten Best Books of 2017
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