Other People's Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night

Her poems shred me with their intelligence, dark humor and black-hearted vision. Parker is one of this generation’s best minds, able to hold herself and her world, which includes all of us, up to impossible lights, revealing every last bit of our hopes, failings, possibilities and raptures – Danez Smith * T Magazine *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 … 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. SmithThis collection further evidences Morgan Parker’s considerable consequence in American poetry. * The New York Times *Fierce, playful and political, Parker’s poems celebrate the everyday just as they face off ancestral hurt… . Meets prejudice with an unwavering eye. * Guardian *Parker’s voice is surprising, ranging from elegiac to conspiratorial to ecstatic; she interrogates both blackness and femininity like ports in a long personal journey, as places to land but also as points of departure. * Vogue *Parker is a poetic superstar * Publishers Weekly *

Morgan Parker is the author of Magical Negro (Corsair 2019), There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce (Corsair 2017), and Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night (Switchback Books 2015). Her poetry and essays have been published and anthologized in numerous publications, including the Paris Review; The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop; Best American Poetry 2016; the New York Times; and the Nation. Parker is the recipient of a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, winner of a 2016 Pushcart Prize, and a Cave Canem graduate fellow.