Other People's Comfort Keeps Me up at Night by Morgan Parker

Half the poems in the collection make me pause in awe and whip out my highlighter, but the rest leave me with little to ponder or appreciate-though this may be a matter of cultural differences or subjective taste. While the poet is skilled at balancing wonderfully specific adjectives with deliberate ambiguity, some of Parker’s poems feel too abstract or simplistic. Poking fun at how pop culture and social issues have transformed into a warped reality, Parker uses humor brilliantly to cover current events and entertainment-both real and fictional. Select titles of her poems are reminiscent of satirical headlines from The Onion, like Real Housewife Considers Feminist Theory While Sketching Designs for Her Handbag Line. Through embodying hilarious and blunt characters from reality shows, Parker showcases unpopular opinions as unfiltered truth. Parker shifts gears easily between melancholy, humor, trivialities, power, vulnerability, and grief.

Her use of space between her words has visceral impact that only the poetic medium can yield.Ĭertain lines left me nostalgic for a feeling or memory my mind can’t identify, like a line from a poem titled In Search of Morgan, Season 3, Episode 24: “Every morning I scrape hymns from the backs of my teeth.” What does this mean, and do I really need to know? It’s an abstract grasp of struggle and endurance. These poems, originally published in 2015, force the reader to acknowledge the multidimensional complexities and intricacies making up Black America: who is crowned and who is laid out to dry? I find myself racing through Parker’s words and scolding myself to abide by her pace, grammar, and punctuation. These poems ask pointed questions, and Parker doesn’t pull any punches exploring the layers of Black identity. There are five separate poems spread throughout the collection titled Miss Black America.

A Cave Canem fellow, graduate of NYU’s Creative Writing MFA program, and poetry editor for Coconut Magazine, Morgan lives in Brooklyn.An adept new introduction from poet Danez Smith sums up the ethos of this collection: “Can I live? Can a Black woman be? Where is the love I deserve? Why are you so stupid? What poison will America be today and can I just, like, be for a second?” They add that Parker’s questions “don’t want power, only consideration, peace.” As the US grapples with racial injustice and inequity, Parker’s collection of poems distills her experience as a Black woman to the page. Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in Tin House, jubilat, and Forklift, Ohio. MORGAN PARKER's first book, Other People's Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night, was selected by Eileen Myles for The 2013 Gatewood Prize and is forthcoming from Switchback Books.

Other People's Comfort Keeps Me up at Night by Morgan Parker