When I saw some of the early headlines around Morgan Parker’s excellent new book of poems, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, I was initially excited. Then my heart sank, because it was jarring to see a complex, expansive work housed in facile garbage clickbait like this: “There’s Poetry About Beyoncé Now—And It’s Amazing,” gushed Mother Jones, blithely ignoring both that the book is a multilayered document of Black womanhood, and that pop culture conceits have made their way into poetry since Frank O’Hara, and possibly before.
I had O’Hara on the brain reading Parker’s words. He might not seem like an obvious touchstone, but there’s a certain breeziness in her poems that makes a space for an undercurrent of pain, a dichotomy that evokes O’Hara’s occasional turns from New York School swagger to misery to a stiff drink and back again.