You Get What You Pay For

October 1, 2023

In You Get What You Pay For, the National Book Critics Circle Award--winning poet Parker offers intimate essays combing through years of loneliness (and subsequent therapy) stemming from feeling unsafe and reckoning with the history of slavery. Prepub Alert.

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Starred review from December 15, 2023
An acclaimed Black poet examines the state of her soul through the lens of race. Parker, the author of Magical Negro, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, is good at snappy titles, clever formulations, and bitter humor, all of which are on display in these provocative and personal reflections, structured as a kind of symphony of themes and metaphors. One of the central images is the slave ship, which features in essays with titles like "Everything Is a Slave Ship: Rupture" and "Strategies for Boat Repair: A Guide to Reparations." Positing that "a Black person can access the feeling of an ancestor if the conditions are so constant and familiar," the author describes a personal feeling of being below deck on a slave ship when paying taxes, having sex with a white man, or "reading poems about dead Black people to an all-white crowd in August 2014, after the police gunned down three in one week, on a wood plank stage in a makeshift basement bar." Elsewhere, Parker analyzes the term African-American, its "hallowed hyphen, bridging Before and After, redistricting Myth and Fact, as transitive as the slave ship and as stagnant." One particular suggestion for reparations is "free therapy." The author has had plenty of the not-free kind, and she details sessions with a series of therapists dating back to her college days in New York. Named, she reveals, after a supporting character on The Cosby Show, she attended the Bill Cosby trial and wondered if we couldn't "burn the man and keep the culture." Her unhappy single state is another theme: "I'm a poet who has never experienced true romantic love; I believe this is an American tragedy." As Parker writes, "Words are ductile, delicate, and loaded like that." Never more so than in her capable hands.

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Starred review from February 15, 2024
Award-winning poet and YA author Parker delves into both the personal and the cultural in this thought-provoking, engaging, and tightly crafted essay collection. "This is what I am trying to say. I am writing to make evidence of myself," she states in the introductory essay, and what follows are pieces that explore her experiences as a Black, creative woman. Parker is adept at illustrating a quotidian moment and drawing concise connections to larger, more encompassing themes, making for a holistic volume. In the remarkable essay, "Are We Not Entertainers?" she relates a conversation with a cab driver during the Bill Cosby trial and examines such topics as self-image, intersectional feminism, misogyny, and public perception of celebrity. In another standout piece, "Everything Is a Slave Ship," Parker sees the direct influence of slavery on the capitalistic excesses of contemporary pop culture in a rap video. "When I see the gold bling around a Black man's neck I don't want to think about how many bodies were sold, but I do. I see signifiers for all the ways American capitalism uses and abuses Black labor and creativity." The writing is captivating, rife with poetic turns of phrase and powerful insights. An absorbing, insightful collection from a multitalented writer.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from April 15, 2024
For African Americans, “becoming a person, forming an identity” is a “sham assignment from the start,” according to this graceful and deeply personal essay collection from National Book Critics Circle Award–winning poet Parker (Magical Negro). Cataloging a lifetime’s worth of mental health struggles, Parker teases out the disadvantage Black Americans are at psychologically (“Before you can ‘find yourself,’ you have to first find the fake self and question how it got put there”). Among other gut-wrenching recollections that center on mental health and racism, she recounts facing pushback for wanting to go to therapy as a teen (“If Blackness was essentially defined by resilience through unimaginable struggle, what indeed did I really have to cry about?”) and an incident where white classmates pointed and laughed at an extension
that had fallen out of her hair (“For me, a serious function of racism is embarrassment.... I mean wanting to be erased”). These memories are presented in fluid tandem with Parker’s astute reflections on such pop culture figures as Serena Williams and Bill Cosby, resulting in a brilliant excavation of the profound link between Black identity and Black mental health (“You see yourself as something to be corrected rather than someone to be helped”) that doubles as a harrowing expression of the relentlessly damaging personal impact of racism. This is breathtaking.