Other People's Comfort Keeps Me up at Night by Morgan Parker

It’s no surprise that Parker centers mental health, especially for those who have read her novel, Who Put This Song On? Indeed, she writes about depression and mental health with absolute brilliance. As these lines promise, she worships the human condition, praises sadness and its place in her experience. Parker considers sadness and trauma often, but never through a lens of despair. Worship instead the wilted flowers gleamingįrom this, we can extrapolate that her connection to identity is tenuous, predicated on a desire to better those around her while also fixating on what most dismiss as fragile, dying. But Parker informs the reader in the very first poem, “ At its core, this is a collection intimately concerned with self-actualization and identity. Each of these poems frames questions with the repeated verbs “does” and “is,” seeking to define “Miss Black America” in various terms. The “Miss Black America” series interrogates Blackness, womanhood and what it means to appeal to the (white male) American gaze. Parker does this with “Miss Black America,” a title she uses for numerous poems she also includes two poems that identify themselves as audition tapes, and two poems simply named “Poem.” These decisions emphasize the repetitiveness of specific experiences and sensations before the reader even engages the poems themselves.

I’m always drawn to the ways in which the poems interact with one another.

One thing that always catches my attention with new collections is when poets choose to include multiple poems with the same title. She’s also terrifyingly comfortable with vulnerability, unique for first collections.

Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night is not the typical debut readers do not encounter Parker as a young and inexperienced author, but as someone who immediately displays a deep understanding of the human condition. But more than that, they unearth what drives this collection and what makes its re-release so necessary. They help frame the importance of this collection, both within Parker’s opus and in the American poetic tradition. While introductions, especially those in poetry collections, rarely interest me, Smith has done something remarkable here. The re-release begins with an introduction from Danez Smith.

Earlier this year, Tin House made the decision to re-release Parker’s debut collection, Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night. Most enter Parker’s poetry through There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce or the award-winning Magical Negro. Over the past six years, Parker has released three full-length collections and a young adult novel, to say nothing of her features on Common ’s A Beautiful Revolution Pt. Morgan Parker has firmly established herself as one of the best and most versatile writers of her generation.

Other People's Comfort Keeps Me up at Night by Morgan Parker