Description

From the author of Magical Negro, Winner of the National Book Critic’s Circle Award

‘Hilarious and hard-hitting . . . it ripples with energy, insight, and searing music’ Tracy K. Smith, author of Wade in the Water

Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night – the book that launched the career of one of our most important young American poets – is now in print for the first time in the UK, featuring a new introduction from Danez Smith.

The debut collection from award-winning poet Morgan Parker demonstrates why she’s become one of the most beloved writers working today. Her command of language is on full display. Parker bobs and weaves between humor and pathos, grief and anxiety, Gwendolyn Brooks and Jay-Z, the New York School and reality television. She collapses any foolish distinctions between the personal and the political, the ‘high’ and the ‘low’. Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night not only introduced an essential new voice to the world, it contains everything readers have come to love about Morgan Parker’s work.

Publisher Review

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. Smith This 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 *