The Fat Black Woman's Poems: Virago 50th Anniversary Edition

(Paperback)

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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'.

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

Author Bio

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.