What’s most evident in Magical Negro is that there is nothing new under the sun. What has happened once will happen again. As a Black woman, this is a lesson that Parker has inherited and internalized. A history as muddied, as denied, and as multifarious as Black history inspires an artist such as Parker to take on many different personas and former lives. She embodies popular Black icons from photographs, music, and film, as in her poem about Diana Ross. She documents her own maturation as a Black woman, which includes meditations on, and resurrections of, the past and how she was conditioned. And, finally, she remains mindful of Black people, even those she’s never known but who bear a common heritage in their faces. Magical Negro is a reminder, finally, of the cycles of Black life, and Parker, moving fluidly through time and space, is a poet unafraid to immortalize them.

In the popular canon the trope of the 'magical Negro' is a black character who turns up exclusively to aid, often through uncanny wisdom, a white character. To say that Parker seeks to reclaim these characters oversimplifies the book’s tense negotiations of pop culture, systemic racism and black womanhood. Rather, Magical Negro highlights the white imagination’s more subtle violences, especially those that wear a smile and extend a hand in the name of charity or diversity, all to depict white people as a tolerant majority ... Her audience here is not the white reader who seeks to experience — and therefore tokenize, exoticize and commodify — 'the other.' That’s not to say white readers shouldn’t read this collection; in fact, I’d argue they should seek it out, if only to push whiteness to the edges of their reading lives ... Parker is a dynamic craftsperson whose associative thinking complicates traditional confessional approaches ... further evidences Morgan Parker’s considerable consequence in American poetry, especially in the way that it demonstrates her skill of nuance. Subtext and allusion abounds in this text, in part because Parker’s dizzying associative leaps reject a hierarchy of 'poetic' subject matter, recognizing that 'everything is urgent.' Especially the poems of Morgan Parker.

... Morgan Parker continues to fearlessly explore what it means to be a black woman in the United States today. Like Terrance Hayes, Parker draws on pop culture, current events and history to inform these poems, providing various backdrops and foils that help her challenge stereotypes and define her own complex, nuanced ideas ... Bold and edgy, the writing spotlights the strength and tenacity that enable the speaker to survive grief and inequity. It also gives voice to her disappointments and delights as she claims — and proclaims — agency over her body and her life.

Parker is a poet of the powerful area between awareness and authority, a writer who will recompose the details around her, brilliantly, until she finds enough space to thrive ... Parker is able to generate command out of nearly any detail ... arker can wring purpose and power from anything, rendering creativity and resilience one and the same ... maintains the sensory creativity of There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, but complicates it with historical and sociocultural texture ... Full and heavy it is ... crackles with the power of identity.

Parker’s poems are well read and richly referential, unhesitant to make her readers reach. Don’t know who American conceptual artist and philosopher Adrian Piper is? Look her up. Film director, producer, and screenwriter Nancy Meyers? Look her up ... Rarely has seeing superficiality and ignorance skewered in poetry been so absorbing. Parker cultivates an assertiveness and an intimacy through her masterful use of rhetorical questions ... It’s a cliché to call a work of art a conversation starter, but this book is. One could spend hours discussing not only the whole collection, but each individual poem ... This endlessly discussable quality means that Magical Negro would be a marvelous book club pick and fantastic in the classroom. For Parker’s material itself is expansive and incisive, but so too is her versatility with form and language ... This agility — exhibited in virtually every poem — serves to create a book that delights and astonishes even as it interrogates.

... a lush, sharp symphony of updated thought on being black in America and what all that heritage means to the conversation the black community is having about the way forward amid the still unresolved issue of an America that refuses to fully acknowledge them as equals, and maybe more importantly, rejects the contributions of black culture and black Americans ... There is also much music and form ... ts exercise in deeper sight works like a certain clairvoyance, as you realize the dancing you heard before, was the sound of feet trying to run from oblivion, to save themselves by proving they matter, something no people should ever have to feel forced to prove.

... potent ... It's hard not to feel completely undressed by every poem ... The poet's vision of Blackness is resplendent, multivalent, complicated, heavy, ever-changing. And beautiful. True, too.

A riveting testimony to everyday blackness ... There is no distinct separation between the writer and her elegy. Parker is uncompromising with her interior life, and between stanzas puts it fully on display. She invites us into her bedroom and therapy sessions. We are left to experience the magnitude of the violated black body: Every day it is bitten with new guilt. It is a moving window into her day-to-day existence, a tenacious black woman rejecting oppressive standards of beauty in favor of profound self-acceptance ... Parker’s boldness and vulnerability are rewarded within the verse, which offers an inquiry of black genius ... Magical Negro’s soft radiance permeates the soul, inspiring a disquieting melancholy. 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.

A profound meditation on the history and future of Black liberation ... A searing indictment, an irreverent lampoon, and a desperately urgent work of poetry, to be read alongside the work of Eve L. Ewing, Tiana Clark, and Nicole Sealey.

As witnessed in this third collection, blackness cannot be confined to a simple definition. Parker writes of the black experience not as an antidote or opposite to whiteness, but a culture and community where irreplicable nuances are created in spite of, not because of, pain and trauma ... Parker uses personal narratives to deconstruct societal stereotypes of black womanhood.