The Fat Black Woman's Poems: From the winner of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry 2021 (Virago Poets)

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But by identifying my intersections are what make me an amazing person that deserves to travel the world.

I love the style, which uses patois and onomatopoeia to make the reader feel like the words are being spoken aloud.I had become a poet without flailing hands because those hands needed to hold on to the books that I was reading from. In it, the Fat Black Woman expresses perhaps a morbid nostalgia for the funereal rituals of the Caribbean. This legacy of slavery and oppression shapes the way black women were viewed based on their weight in a way that does not affect women of other races and Nichols uses her poetry to illuminate this fact.

It is not hubris to say she was transforming Jamaica; my little island, which at the time was even more homophobic than it is now, was being held in the palm of her hand and being moved by a performance the likes of which the island had never experienced before. It made it much easier to get to Plitvice to see the waterfalls and do a very gentle “hike” around the park.In the very next line of the poem ‘If Only Out Of Vanity’, Chin says, ‘I want to be the girl your parents will use as a bad example of a lady’. The agency guaranteed that for us by only securing accommodations at places they have relationships with. And there was something so nervous and vulnerable and exciting about her, the way she carried with her this energy that would never ebb.

Perhaps I do not read the poem because of what I fear will be seen as its ‘unseemly demonstrativeness’. I am not certain now why I chose to read that particular bit of verse; perhaps it was an instinctive knowing that some poems have within them their own energy and need little help from their readers. This is the sort of book I am glad that my university course made me read as I know that I would never have picked it up otherwise. If there is a poem that I do not read for fear of its volume, there is a poet in my lineage who I do not acknowledge enough for the same reason – the Jamaican poet and activist Staceyann Chin. I’m embarrassed now that I have hardly acknowledged the influence of Staceyann Chin who in polite and tasteful literary circles does not stand up well as a suitable influence.The poem is poignant precisely for the way it holds the two contrasting emotions in close proximity – the hope, and the despair. The Fat Black Woman would like to hear a good old-fashioned bawl – a screaming out – and then to be lulled by those sleepless droning red-eyed wake nights. In those different areas the book is further separated into different portions of her life that impacted the person she is now.