Books like Magical Negro
NBCC-winning poems that dissect the stereotype of its title and the specific loneliness of Black womanhood in contemporary American culture.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Magical Negro
Citizen: An American Lyric
A genre-bending work using poetry, essay, and image to document the accumulation of racial microaggressions and violence in everyday American life.
The Sellout
A Black farmer in Dickens, a Los Angeles neighbourhood that has been quietly wiped off the map, sets out to put it back, by reinstating slavery and segregating the local school.
American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
Seventy sonnets written in the first months of the Trump presidency, each an address to an imagined assassin, Black life, and the ghosts of the form.
Alive at the End of the World
Poems written through the pandemic, private loss and public Black death, elegies that refuse to choose between the historical and the personal.
The Tradition
Pulitzer-winning collection where Brown's invented duplex form holds up the violence against Black bodies alongside desire, faith, and flowers.
Wade in the Water
The former US Poet Laureate writes through Civil War letters, motherhood, and ecological grief, listening for the voices buried in the national record.
Don't Call Us Dead
Opens with a vision of a Black afterlife free of police bullets, then turns inward to a young HIV-positive Black queer poet writing to survive.
Homie
A book-length love letter to the friends who keep Smith alive, in poems that refuse both despair and easy access.
A Portable Paradise
T.S. Eliot-winning poems of London, Grenfell Tower, windrush childhood, and the portable paradise a grandmother insisted her grandson carry.
Howl and Other Poems
The poem that launched the Beat Generation and an obscenity trial, a howl against conformity, capitalism and the destruction of the best minds of a generation, with other early poems.
Colored Television
Jane, a mixed-race novelist in Los Angeles, has spent ten years on a serious book about mixed-race America, and broke and house-sitting for a famous friend, she decides to try selling a television show instead.
Generation X
Andy, Dag and Claire, three twentysomethings who have walked out of their careers, work dead-end jobs in Palm Springs and tell each other stories to make sense of a world that seems to have no place for them.