There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce

There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce is a collection of poems around Black womanhood and what it means to exists as a Black woman in the United States. In Hottentot Venus, the poem begins “I wish my pussy could live / in a different shape and get / some goddamn respect.” This poem addresses the hypersexualization and commodification Black women are subjected to in their own bodies for merely exisitng under the circumstances the U.S. has created through foul legacies of colonialism, white supremacy, and racism. She writes “I am technically nothing / human. / I will never be / a woman. ” In the lines before she says she’s being held captive, and in the lines after these she explains what I understood to be a memory / moment that exists due to the hypersexualization and commodification of Black women’s bodies. She ends the poem “I am here to show you / who you are, to cradle / your large skulls / and remind you / you are perfect. Mother America, / unleash your sons. / Everything beautiful, you own.” I feel the closing of this poem reminds us that these are conditions Black women are forced to live under because of the racist legacies in the U.S. I also see in these lines the exhaustion of having to live like this; of having to ‘remind’ this country of its ‘perfection’ and all the emotional/spiritual/mental/physical labor Black women are forced and expected to undergo every day, and how heavy that can translate into feeling in the body. In Welcome to the Jungle we see Morgan Parker is what feels like a stream of thoughts running on a highway reflecting life, we also see this in Another Another Autumn in New York. This book is full of so much life, in all its confusion, joy, pain, and reflection. Morgan Parker is brilliant.