The Fat Black Woman's Poems

by Grace Nichols

Overview

Beauty
is a fat black woman
walking the fields
pressing a breezed
hibiscus
to her cheek
while the sun lights up
her feet
 
 Nichols gives us images that stare us straight in the eye, images of joy, challenge, accusation. Her 'fat black woman' is brash; rejoices in herself; poses awkward questions to politicians, rulers, suitors, to a white world that still turns its back. Grace Nichols writes in a language that is wonderfully vivid yet economical of the pleasures and sadnesses of memory, of loving, of 'the power to be what I am, a woman, charting my own futures'.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780349017402
Publisher:	Little, Brown Book Group
Publication date:	10/31/2023
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Born in 1950 in Guyana, where she grew up, Grace Nichols worked as a journalist and reporter. She came to Britain in 1977 and has published several children's books. Her cycle of poems, I Is a Long Memoried Woman, won the 1983 Commonwealth Poetry Prize.

Editorial Reviews

Deliciously inert and self contented, the fat black woman mocks oppression by the scandal of being herself...—INDEPENDENT on Sunday

Run naturally and economically off the tongue. Beneath the folk rhythms and the lyrical simplicities, Nichols's poems preach disquiet—OBSERVER

From the Publisher