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

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Though she was touring America, Africa and Asia, packing schools and auditoriums, appearing on slots on the Oprah Winfrey show, the poetry community had still dismissed her.

Part of Virago's Five Gold Reads: five reissues of significant titles representing fifty years of feminist publishing. Despite her strong sense of self and her humorous outlook, it is not always easy for the Fat Black Woman. Thankfully, therapy has helped unpack weight I should not have to carry, and traveling is now something I look forward to. The majority of people might not hear what is happening beneath such accolades, not even those who genuinely meant to compliment me, but to some extent I am being praised for the extent to which I am black, but not too black – the ways in which I have pitched blackness at an appropriate volume.Over and over Walcott has articulated similar thoughts – counting himself not just as any inheritor but a royal inheritor into the tradition of English language poetry. First of all, there's the name that the family use daily, Such as Peter, Augustus, Alonzo or James, Such as Victor or Jonathan, George or Bill Bailey - All of them s. It must have been at around the same time that I had met Walcott and he had told us about poetry not being a democracy. The following are the first two of four poems I'm featuring here from Guyanese poet, Grace Nichols' sexy little collection titled The Fat Black Woman's Poems.

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. What is even more important as we develop this business of emergent language in the Caribbean, is the actual rhythm and the syllables, the very software, in a way, of the language. Travelling alone with a toddler despite all ‘good advice’ has now gotten me a seasoned 7- year old who happily trundles along om backpacking trips, enjoying the experience and hardly ever complaining about anything. I am quite aware that it would take a far wiser head than mine to answer such a question, but if I were forced to hazard a guess, I would say that it is the very lack of obvious drama or spectacle that sets the beauty of our land apart.

Originally conceived by Eliot himself, Old Toffer's Book of Consequential Dog poems are a witty, varied and exquisitely compiled as Eliot's cats. A common attitude here in Europe is that you, as a Black American, are fine but them, the recent immigrants from African countries, are not and at least in Italy, those people will often sell things on the streets, have bad living conditions… I have no idea how it is in Croatia, mostly the touristy places try to hide all that but that might be something the average whit person won’t notice. The Fat Black Woman, however, glories in her sexuality, the pleasure of her own soft centre, and also she relishes her mind – the sheer playfulness of her thoughts, and how she is able to bring strange and sometimes dissonant ideas into a productive relationship with each other. It made it much easier to get to Plitvice to see the waterfalls and do a very gentle “hike” around the park.