There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce

Black History Month

Staff recommendations, guest essays, and curated reading lists.

Just as good as a Beyoncé album with bonus tracks. These poems are as hard-hitting as they are funny. You're going to be hearing from Morgan Parker for a long time, I bet. And thank God, because we need her. Recommended By Kevin S., Powells.com

There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce uses political and pop-cultural references as a framework to explore 21st century black American womanhood and its complexities: performance, depression, isolation, exoticism, racism, femininity, and politics. The poems weave between personal narrative and pop-cultural criticism, examining and confronting modern media, consumption, feminism, and Blackness. This collection explores femininity and race in the contemporary American political climate, folding in references from jazz standards, visual art, personal family history, and Hip Hop. The voice of this book is a multifarious one: writing and rewriting bodies, stories, and histories of the past, as well as uttering and bearing witness to the truth of the present, and actively probing toward a new self, an actualized self. This is a book at the intersections of mythology and sorrow, of vulnerability and posturing, of desire and disgust, of tragedy and excellence.

"Yet despite fluctuations in voice, these poems are, without a doubt, Parker's as she encapsulates vulnerability, feminism, and utter fearlessness in rhythmic, glittering verse." Booklist

"This is a marvelous book. See for yourself. Morgan Parker is a fearlessly forward and forward-thinking literary star." Terrance Hayes

"Art hurts," wrote poet Gwendolyn Brooks. "Art urges voyages." Morgan Parker's poems hurt deeply and voyage widely. They...take you on an adventure like no other." D.A. Powell

"Outstanding collection of poems. So much soul. So much intelligence in how Parker folds in cultural references and the experiences of black womanhood. Every poem will get its hooks into you." Roxane Gay

The only thing more beautiful than Beyonc is God, and God is a black woman sipping ros and drawing a lavender bath, texting her mom, belly-laughing in the therapist's office, feeling unloved, being on display, daring to survive. Morgan Parker stands at the intersections of vulnerability and performance, of desire and disgust, of tragedy and excellence. Unrelentingly feminist, tender, ruthless, and sequined, these poems are an altar to the complexities of black American womanhood in an age of non-indictments and deja vu, and a time of wars over bodies and power. These poems celebrate and mourn. They are a chorus chanting: You're gonna give us the love we need.

Morgan Parker is the author of Other People's Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night, selected by Eileen Myles for the 2013 Gatewood Prize. Her work has been featured in numerous publications and anthologies, including Why I Am Not A Painter, The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, and Best American Poetry 2016. Winner of a 2016 Pushcart Prize and a Cave Canem graduate fellow, Morgan lives in Brooklyn, New York. She works as an editor for Little A and Day One, moonlights as poetry editor of The Offing, and co-curates the Poets With Attitude (PWA) reading series with Tommy Pico. With poet and performer Angel Nafis, she is The Other Black Girl Collective.