Book Review (By Masha Jennings)

Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night, Morgan Parker. (Switchback Books, 2015.)

Morgan Parker’s recently released book Other People’s Comfort is a sixty-three page collection of poetry that keeps it personal. Much like Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency (Grove Press, 1957), Parker’s book has many very selective references that aren’t fully accessible to every reader. “What they preach in Clark County is false./” (Other People’s Comfort, p.41, 2015). As Matthew Rohrer says in a blurb on the Back Cover, “[Parker’s Poems] have a New York School sensibility, but it’s a new New York: a more polarized, unequal, and privileged New York.” The title of Parker’s collection captures some of that inequality when she talks about “Other People’s Comfort”.

The most striking poem/s in the book is/are “Miss Black America” (p.6,14,33,42,& 52). These five separate pieces are connected by a single title with no notion that they are either separate or part of the same poem. They ask the questions towards a figure of: a Black Miss America, and a Miss Black America. “Does she bother spitting her seeds” (p.6, 2015). The lack of a question mark raises the question of whether or not these poems are really addressed to any one external so much as internal or an inner questioning within the poem/poet herself.

Is she brushstroke or installation

Is her gown           out of season

Is her necklace made of blood

Diamonds from Sierra Leone chorus

played back as her sash

hangs like a strange heavy fruit

Has she dreamed of this day

since the moon was blue

Is she the window and the breaking

of the window

Does she neo-expression

her way out of the hood

(p.42, 2015).