The award-winning author of Magical Negro traces&nbsp;the trauma and beauty of existing as a Black woman&nbsp;back through American history, from the foundational trauma of the slave trade all the way&nbsp;up&nbsp;to Serena Williams and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina Dubbed a voice of her generation, poet and writer Morgan Parker has spent much of her adulthood in therapy, trying to square the resonance of her writing with the alienation she feels in nearly every aspect of life,&nbsp;from her lifelong singleness to her battle with depression. She traces this loneliness to an inability to feel truly safe with others and a historic hyper-awareness stemming from the effects of slavery. In this collection of essays as intimate as being in the room with Morgan and her therapist, Morgan examines America's cultural history and relationship to Black Americans through the ages, through such topics as the ubiquity of a beauty culture that excludes Black women, the implications of Bill Cosby's fall from grace in a culture predicated on acceptance through respectability, and the pitfalls of visibility as seen through the mischaracterizations of Serena Williams as alternately iconic and too ambitious. With piercing wit and incisive observations, You Get What You Pay For is ultimately a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness and its effects on mental well-being in America today. Weaving unflinching criticism with intimate anecdotes, this devastating memoir-in-essays paints a portrait of one Black woman's psyche--and of the writer's search to both tell the truth and deconstruct it.

You Get What You Pay For: Essays

Biographies & Memoirs

Parker, Morgan

Community & Culture

One World

Who Put This Song On?

"Unflinchingly irreverent, laugh-out-loud funny, and heartbreakingly honest." —Elizabeth Acevedo, National Book Award winner and New York Times bestselling author of The Poet X In the vein of powerful reads like The Hate U Give and Girl in Pieces, comes poet Morgan Parker's pitch-perfect novel about a black teenage girl searching for her identity when the world around her views her depression as a lack of faith and blackness as something to be politely ignored. Trapped in sunny, stifling, small-town suburbia, seventeen-year-old Morgan knows why she's in therapy. She can't count the number of times she's been the only non-white person at the sleepover, been teased for her "weird" outfits, and been told she's not "really" black. Also, she's spent most of her summer crying in bed. So there's that, too. Lately, it feels like the whole world is listening to the same terrible track on repeat--and it's telling them how to feel, who to vote for, what to believe. Morgan wonders, when can she turn this song off and begin living for herself? Loosely based on her own teenage life and diaries, this incredible debut by award-winning poet Morgan Parker will make readers stand up and cheer for a girl brave enough to live life on her own terms--and for themselves. "Morgan Parker put THIS song on--and I hope it never turns off." —Nic Stone, New York Times bestselling author of Dear Martin and Odd One Out “A triumphant first impression in the YA space.” —Entertainment Weekly “An incredibly heartfelt, deep story about a girl's coming of age.” —Refinery29

Teen & Young Adult

Literature & Fiction

DELACORTE PRESS

"Unflinchingly irreverent, laugh-out-loud funny, and heartbreakingly honest." —Elizabeth Acevedo, National Book Award winner and New York Times bestselling author of The Poet X\nIn the vein of powerful reads like The Hate U Give and The Poet X, comes poet Morgan Parker's pitch-perfect novel about a black teenage girl searching for her identity when the world around her views her depression as a lack of faith and blackness as something to be politely ignored.\nTrapped in sunny, stifling, small-town suburbia, seventeen-year-old Morgan knows why she's in therapy. She can't count the number of times she's been the only non-white person at the sleepover, been teased for her "weird" outfits, and been told she's not "really" black. Also, she's spent most of her summer crying in bed. So there's that, too.\nLately, it feels like the whole world is listening to the same terrible track on repeat--and it's telling them how to feel, who to vote for, what to believe. Morgan wonders, when can she turn this song off and begin living for herself?\nLoosely based on her own teenage life and diaries, this incredible debut by award-winning poet Morgan Parker will make readers stand up and cheer for a girl brave enough to live life on her own terms--and for themselves.\n"Morgan Parker put THIS song on--and I hope it never turns off." —Nic Stone, New York Times bestselling author of Dear Martin and Odd One Out\n“A triumphant first impression in the YA space.” —Entertainment Weekly\n“An incredibly heartfelt, deep story about a girl's coming of age.” —Refinery29

Politics & Social Sciences

Sociology

Ember

Eclipse Saga Vol. 1

Comics & Graphic Novels

Graphic Novels

lulu.com

Speech/Acts brings together new and recent works by a generation of artists influenced by black experimental poetry. Recognizing language as a primary method of expressing and maintaining power, these artists use poetry as a tool to manipulate the conceptual and structural elements of language and the social contexts in which language is employed, appropriated and abstracted. Artists Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Steffani Jemison, Tony Lewis, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Kameelah Janan Rasheed and Martine Syms all use experimental poetry in their work as a means to interrogate the power structures of language, rendering the experience of blackness more physically and affectively exact. In this volume, their work is presented alongside their poetic forerunners (seminal texts by Fred Moten and Harryette Mullen are reprinted), newly commissioned poetry by Morgan Parker and Simone White, and a new essay by curator Meg Onli.

Speech/Acts

Arts & Photography

Moten, Fred

Mullen, Harryette

Onli, Meg

White, Simone

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Institute of Contemporary Art at University of Pennsylvania/Futurepoem

Poetry. African American Studies. "I love these poems by Morgan Parker. They tell everything exactly like it is, and they don't let us off the hook—about how we run this country, about race, about how we spend our time. They treat our private, public, and online lives with all the love and scorn they deserve. They hit you with the authority and moral clarity of Langston Hughes, and have the omnivorous eye of Frank O'Hara. They have a New York School sensibility, but it's a new New York—a more polarized, unequal, and privileged New York. These poems are also just beautiful. You will want to say them to yourselves."—Matthew Rohrer "Honesty, says one of Morgan Parker's speakers, 'is uncomfortable and funny.' And how apt, how acrobatic and unflinching Parker is in bearing this thesis out. Her work roves the surfaces of our American lives—gathering up material from reality TV, from the many products we consume and are shaped by, from the sound of America in our mouths, and the racket of it in our ears. These poems are delightful in their playful ability to rake through our contemporary moment in search of all manner of riches, just as they are devastating in their ability to remind us of what we look like when nobody's watching, and of what the many things we don't—or can't—say add up to. OTHER PEOPLE'S COMFORT KEEPS ME UP AT NIGHT is hilarious and hard-hitting, and it ripples with energy, insight, and searing music."—Tracy K. Smith "I can and have read Morgan Parker's poems over and over. They make me high and think like this: Her mind and her thoughts can go anywhere in a poem. She pulls us up short, and when she says 'the sky the sky' I feel that expanse... I start taking notes: She is making a map of what human can be... she's raucous and engaged... indeterminate, visceral... collisions... these are full adventures in scale... Morgan Parker is both intellectual and concerned. Where sentences come from (in me) breaks down when I read these poems. There are piles of masterpieces here. 'I'm not like the king of black people,' to point you to one. She writes history and pleasure and kitsch and abstraction, then vanishes like a god in about 13 inches and I mean that is really cool."—Eileen Myles

Other People's Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night

Poetry

Switchback Books

non friction

Humor & Satire

QuoteStork Media, Inc.

QuoteStork Media Incorporated

Violets & Violence

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