The Fat Black Woman's Poems

Grace Nichols gives us images that stare us straight in the eye—images of joy, and images that challenge and accuse. Her "Fat Black Woman" is brash, rejoices in herself, and poses awkward questions to politicians, rulers, suitors, and to a white world that still turns its back. In language that is vivid yet spare, Grace Nichols writes of the pleasures and sadness of memory, of loving, of the power to be what I am, a woman, charting my own futures.

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

'Deliciously inert and self-contented, the fat black woman mocks oppression by the scandal of being herself. Inside this slim collection there is a fat woman not even fighting to get out' INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY 'Run naturally and economically off the tongue. Beneath the folk rhythms and the lyrical simplicities, Nichols's poems preach disquiet' OBSERVER

Born in 1950 in Guyana, where she grew up, Grace Nichols worked as a jounalist 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.

Grace 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'.

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