Other People's Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night: Poems
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
ABA Indie Poetry Bestseller
From the author of Magical Negro, Winner of the National Book Critic's Circle Award
Named a Best Book of the Month by Oprah Daily, BuzzFeed, Ms. Magazine, Nylon, ALTA and a Best Book of the Summer by Glamour and Publishers Weekly
“Hilarious and hard-hitting . . . it ripples with energy, insight, and searing music.” —Tracy K. Smith, author of Wade in the Water
Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night—the book that launched the career of one of our most important young American poets—is back in print.
The debut collection from award-winning poet Morgan Parker demonstrates why she’s become one of the most beloved writers working today. Her command of language is on full display. Parker bobs and weaves between humor and pathos, grief and anxiety, Gwendolyn Brooks and Jay-Z, the New York School and reality television. She collapses any foolish distinctions between the personal and the political, the “high” and the “low.” Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night not only introduced an essential new voice to the world, it contains everything readers have come to love about Morgan Parker’s work.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this debut collection, 2013 winner of the Gatewood Prize from Switchback Books (selected by Eileen Myles), Parker plays with pop culture and personal history to craft poems of deep intelligence and quick wit. The poems inhabit a world of Real Housewives and Jay-Z, repurposed song lyrics and emptied drinks, where "Touching you on the shoulder/ is the most honest I've been/ all week." These declarations have their own style of confident fun, as "Cinderella jams to Curtis Mayfield/ while scrubbing her/ own vomit from the bathroom/ tiles. On her hands and knees/ she's all like,/ Damn why/ I gotta be the man of the house?" Parker displays mettle when, instead of writing a simple ode to the Moon, she spits bourbon at it: "you said you'd never disrupt space/ I said hell I own it." It's all the more exciting because that mettle reveals itself to be vulnerable and desirous, to be as set on understanding the world as on changing it. Like the best poets, Parker moves conversations forward conversations about poetry, race, femininity. Readers will do themselves a favor by paying attention to this powerful debut.
