num_pages: 112
description: 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 politicsof 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 presenttimeless Black melancholies and triumphs.
language: English
title: Magical Negro
publisher: Tin House Books