![]() ![]() ![]() In Magical Negro, Parker fuses her pop cultural sensibility to a more fluid timeline of Black history, culture, and autobiography. Her sophomore collection, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé (2017), is rife with intertextual reminders that beauty exists beyond the frame of fame and power. Her figures are ravenous and shape-shifting and eager to wrestle with time.Įver since Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night (2015), her debut collection, Parker has engaged with contemporary pop culture, Black celebrity, and how Black excellence comes at a cost. But the figures in Parker’s poems aren’t interested in guiding white people to the promised land. There’s Scatman Crothers in The Shining (1980), Whoopi Goldberg in Ghost (1990), Morgan Freeman in The Shawshank Redemption (1994), Will Smith in Hitch (2005)-the list goes on. Defined as a Black person who is alchemically gifted and exists to set others-usually white people-on the road to self-improvement or good fortune, magical Negroes have long been a Hollywood trope. ![]() Such exploitation is also a hallmark of the magical Negro. What if the juice she’s sucking from her thumb is men’s blood instead of barbecue sauce? What if her Afro is tousled from sex and not the heat or the wind? This isn’t a poem about satisfaction but about exhaustion with people taking something from a woman yet again. ![]() When I read this poem, “Magical Negro #217: Diana Ross Finishing a Rib in Alabama, 1990s,” I reimagine Ross altogether. ![]()
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