The Fat Black Woman's Poems

Celebrating five decades of the feminist publisher, each of the Five Gold Reads represents an iconic moment in Virago's history, from the 1970s to today. 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, and accusation. Her 'fat black woman' is brash; she rejoices in herself and poses awkward questions to politicians, rulers, suitors, and a white world that still turns its back. Grace Nichols writes in a language that is wonderfully vivid yet economical, capturing the pleasures and sadnesses of memory, of loving, and of 'the power to be what I am, a woman, charting my own futures.'.