Magical Negro
Poems
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Narrated by:
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Morgan Parker
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By:
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Morgan Parker
About this listen
From the breakout author of There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé comes a profound and deceptively funny exploration of black American womanhood.
"Morgan Parker's latest collection is a riveting testimony to everyday blackness.... It is wry and atmospheric, an epic work of aural pleasures and personifications that demands to be read - both as an account of a private life and as searing political protest." (TIME Magazine)
A Most Anticipated Book of 2019 at Vogue, O: the Oprah Magazine, NYLON, BuzzFeed, Publishers Weekly, and more.
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 politics - of 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 present - timeless black melancholies and triumphs.
©2019 Morgan Parker (P)2019 Audible, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Overall
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Performance
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One of the most recognizable young poets in America, Olivia Gatwood dazzles with her tribute to contemporary American womanhood in her debut book, New American Best Friend. Gatwood's poems deftly deconstruct traditional stereotypes. The focus shifts from childhood to adulthood, gender to sexuality, violence to joy. And always and inexorably, the book moves toward celebration, culminating in a series of odes: odes to the body, to tough women, to embracing your own journey in all its failures and triumphs.
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Overall
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Performance
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From navigating the oft competing worlds of religion and desire, to balancing society’s expectations with the raw experience of being a woman in the world; from detailing the experiences of growing up as a first generation black British woman, to working through situations of dependence and abuse; from finding solace in the echoing caverns of depression and loss, to exploring the vulnerability and redemption in falling in love, each of the raw and immediate poems in Daley-Ward’s bone resonates to the core of what it means to be human.
-
-
Visceral,blood hot, thrilling poetry-prose
- By Pam on 12-28-22
By: Yrsa Daley-Ward, and others
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A nameless El Salvadoran man, fleeing torture and imprisonment, arrives in the United States - his only hope for asylum. The American woman who has volunteered to help him is searching for something to add meaning to her life. When these two lonely people meet, their haunting relationship fulfills their hearts' desires, but it also gives life to their darkest dreams.
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Story
With only a yellowing photograph in hand, a young man—also named Jonathan Safran Foer—sets out to find the woman who might or might not have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Accompanied by an old man haunted by memories of the war, an amorous dog named Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior, and the unforgettable Alex, a young Ukrainian translator who speaks in a sublimely butchered English, Jonathan is led on a quixotic journey over a devastated landscape and into an unexpected past.
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Astounding reading
- By bookworm123abc on 02-10-23
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Citizen Illegal
- By: José Olivarez
- Narrated by: Jose Olivarez
- Length: 1 hr and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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In this "devastating debut" (Publishers Weekly), poet José Olivarez explores the stories, contradictions, joys, and sorrows that embody life in the spaces between Mexico and America. He paints vivid portraits of good kids, bad kids, families clinging to hope, life after the steel mills, gentrifying barrios, and everything in between. Drawing on the rich traditions of Latinx and Chicago writers like Sandra Cisneros and Gwendolyn Brooks, Olivarez creates a home out of life in the in-between.
By: José Olivarez
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Tiger, Tiger
- A Memoir
- By: Margaux Fragoso
- Narrated by: Susan Bennett
- Length: 12 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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One summer day, Margaux Fragoso meets Peter Curran at the neighborhood swimming pool, and they begin to play. She is seven; he is 51. When Peter invites her and her mother to his house, the little girl finds a child’s paradise of exotic pets and an elaborate backyard garden. Her mother, beset by mental illness and overwhelmed by caring for Margaux, is grateful for the attention Peter lavishes on her, and he creates an imaginative universe for her, much as Lewis Carroll did for his real-life Alice.
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a weirdly loving diatribe against pervs.
- By Dane Flakeman on 05-21-11
By: Margaux Fragoso
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Falconer
- By: John Cheever
- Narrated by: Jay Snyder
- Length: 6 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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A convict named Farragut struggles to remain a man while inside a nightmarish prison. Cheever crafted his most powerful work of fiction out of Farragut's suffering and astonishing salvation.
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Unsettling and beautiful
- By Darwin8u on 01-21-13
By: John Cheever
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Abandon Me
- Memoirs
- By: Melissa Febos
- Narrated by: Melissa Febos
- Length: 7 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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In her critically acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart, Melissa Febos laid bare the intimate world of the professional dominatrix, turning an honest examination of her life into a lyrical study of power, desire, and fulfillment. In her dazzling Abandon Me, Febos captures the intense bonds of love and the need for connection - with family, lovers, and oneself. First, her birth father, who left her with only an inheritance of addiction and Native American blood, its meaning a mystery.
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This journey is captivating to say the least!
- By Ilanna on 08-11-17
By: Melissa Febos
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We Want Our Bodies Back
- Poems
- By: Jessica Care Moore
- Narrated by: Jessica Care Moore
- Length: 2 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Over the past two decades, Jessica Care moore has become a cultural force as a poet, performer, publisher, activist, and critic. Reflecting her transcendent electric voice, this searing poetry collection is filled with moving, original stanzas that speak to both Black women’s creative and intellectual power, and express the pain, sadness, and anger of those who suffer constant scrutiny because of their gender and race.
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Just beautiful.
- By @oil_house_ (IG) on 02-25-21
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Waiting for Snow in Havana
- Confessions of a Cuban Boy
- By: Carlos Eire
- Narrated by: David Drummond
- Length: 16 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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A childhood in a privileged household in 1950s Havana was joyous and cruel, like any other - but with certain differences. The neighbor's monkey was liable to escape and run across your roof. Surfing was conducted by driving cars across the breakwater. Lizards and firecrackers made frequent contact. Carlos Eire's childhood was a little different from most. His father was convinced he had been Louis XVI in a past life. At school, classmates were attended by chauffeurs and bodyguards. Then, in January 1959, the world changed....
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Poorly chosen narrator
- By LS on 02-10-16
By: Carlos Eire
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Your Voice in My Head
- A Memoir
- By: Emma Forrest
- Narrated by: Emma Forrest
- Length: 5 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Emma Forrest, a British journalist, was just 22 and living the fast life in New York City when she realized that her quirks had gone beyond eccentricity. In a cycle of loneliness, damaging relationships, and destructive behavior, she found herself in the chair of a slim, balding, and effortlessly optimistic psychiatrist--a man whose wisdom and humanity would wrench her from the dangerous tide after she tried to end her life.
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Great, quick read
- By Amazon Customer on 02-12-21
By: Emma Forrest
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The Ground Beneath Her Feet
- By: Salman Rushdie
- Narrated by: Steven Crossley
- Length: 27 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Salman Rushdie is widely considered one of a handful of truly great living writers. The internationally acclaimed, Booker Prize-winning author's storytelling shines in this epic love story, a modern retelling of the myth of Orpheus.
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Okay, Salmon, We get that you're a genious already
- By Julie A Quinn on 04-23-09
By: Salman Rushdie
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I'm the One That I Want
- By: Margaret Cho
- Narrated by: Margaret Cho
- Length: 4 hrs and 57 mins
- Abridged
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I'm the One That I Want, based on her show of the same name, is filled with dead-on insights about the experience of being a woman with attitude, of flowing with the highs and lows of life, and of creating one's own identity and acceptance. It is every bit as hilarious, shocking, and irreverent as she is.
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Hilarious and deeply engrossing
- By Ling on 04-10-03
By: Margaret Cho
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Herzog
- By: Saul Bellow
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 15 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Winner of the National Book Award when it was first published in 1964, Herzog traces five days in the life of a failed academic whose wife has recently left him for his best friend. Through the device of letter writing, Herzog movingly portrays both the internal life of its eponymous hero and the complexity of modern consciousness.
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Grows Within You
- By Chris Reich on 08-06-11
By: Saul Bellow
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You Better Be Lightning
- By: Andrea Gibson
- Narrated by: Andrea Gibson
- Length: 1 hr and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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You Better Be Lightning ranges from close examination of the deeply personal to the vastness of the world, exploring the expansiveness of the human experience from love to illness, from space to climate change, and so much more in between.
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Disappointed
- By Rikki B. on 01-31-23
By: Andrea Gibson
What listeners say about Magical Negro
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Arryn Allen
- 01-24-23
a unique way to convey a mass truth
i wasn’t expecting this book to be written in such a free form, but i enjoyed it.
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- Heron Simmonds-Price
- 04-19-20
Poems not seen
So this listening to books is new to me and listening to these poems felt awkward. I often wanted to do what I do when I read poetry, which is go over the lines again to catch the meaning. That seemed out of order, although I guess I could rewind....
There was a randomness to the poems. Sometimes I was not sure when one ended and another began. Sometimes the poems were a list. This made me want to see the text....
Part of my problem might be that I listen to more rap than poetry and this was not very musical; or lyrical for that matter. I still want to give the text a read to see if it will strike me differently.
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- Lida
- 07-19-20
Waste of time
I literally want to know what Morgan Parker is talking about. This melancholy collage of non essentially utterances was anything but magical. Extremely disappointing and not a good use of time.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Ro
- 03-05-19
I usually like her poems
I struggled with this book. I am not sure what it was but, I could not grasp her writing in this one.
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1 person found this helpful