there are more beautiful things than beyoncé

Readers looking for lighthearted adulation of Beyoncé may be disappointed-although Parker clearly admires Beyoncé, these are not praise poems instead, they bend the image of Beyoncé to Parker’s purposes and reflect her own personal struggles and preoccupations.

Beyoncé’s presence is felt throughout-as inspiration, as guide, as an avatar for Parker’s meditations on what it means to be a Black woman today. Throughout the collection, Parker is in conversation with contemporary pop culture, especially her primary muse, Beyoncé. She tells us, “I am a tree and some fruits are good and some are bad.” As Parker demonstrates, beauty is not always simple or even pleasurable-sometimes it’s contradictory and confusing. What better art form than poetry, then, for Morgan Parker to use in her new book, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé? The book is a tribute to Black American womanhood, an ode to the joys and sorrows and triumphs of being Black and female in this sick, lovely, dangerous world-and every word inside is beautiful, even when they hit you hard like a punch in the chest or make you want to cry. Poetry is language operating at its highest purpose, called through compression and complexity of image to function on an aesthetic level while communicating meaning.

There are more beautiful things than beyoncé