YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR

An acclaimed Black poet examines the state of her soul through the lens of race.

Parker, the author of Magical Negro, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, is good at snappy titles, clever formulations, and bitter humor, all of which are on display in these provocative and personal reflections, structured as a kind of symphony of themes and metaphors. One of the central images is the slave ship, which features in essays with titles like “Everything Is a Slave Ship: Rupture” and “Strategies for Boat Repair: A Guide to Reparations.” Positing that “a Black person can access the feeling of an ancestor if the conditions are so constant and familiar,” the author describes a personal feeling of being below deck on a slave ship when paying taxes, having sex with a white man, or “reading poems about dead Black people to an all-white crowd in August 2014, after the police gunned down three in one week, on a wood plank stage in a makeshift basement bar.” Elsewhere, Parker analyzes the term African-American, its “hallowed hyphen, bridging Before and After, redistricting Myth and Fact, as transitive as the slave ship and as stagnant.” One particular suggestion for reparations is “free therapy.” The author has had plenty of the not-free kind, and she details sessions with a series of therapists dating back to her college days in New York. Named, she reveals, after a supporting character on The Cosby Show, she attended the Bill Cosby trial and wondered if we couldn’t “burn the man and keep the culture.” Her unhappy single state is another theme: “I’m a poet who has never experienced true romantic love; I believe this is an American tragedy.”

As Parker writes, “Words are ductile, delicate, and loaded like that.” Never more so than in her capable hands.