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

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I have loved her for so many years, from the time I met her in Jamaica and she began to tell me many things – about poetry, about theory and about this other country that I would be moving to, and how I might fight for a space within it. 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. Here in the present ocean of this essay are massive philosophical ideas about aesthetics and the appreciation of art – ideas that have carried on from Aristotle to Hegel to Kant, back and forth questions of whether beauty is inherent or socially constructed, on whether aesthetics as a discipline belongs to the sciences or to philosophy?

These are words that have been attached to my own work but which I suggest act as a sort of dog whistle criticism.

Part of Virago's Five Gold Reads: five reissues of significant titles representing fifty years of feminist publishing.

What changed immediately was my performance; I would never read my own poems in the same way again, with an affected shyness that one was made to believe was the way serious poets read – eyes glued to the page on which we insist our poetry is rooted. Her love of trap music led her to the top of hip-hop journalism, profiling game-changing artists like Megan Thee Stallion, Lizzo, and Janelle Monae. Great writing and not only does it frustrate me that we live in a world where this thought process needs to instigated, but where you wrote about your concern if people will take pictures (insert angry face emoji). I’ve been a bit scared to, honestly, since my body has been more sh*tty as of late, but with the right tools and attitude, I could do it again. It is in fact Nichols who encourages us to do this in the very title of the collection – that possessive which grants the character authorship.

It made it much easier to get to Plitvice to see the waterfalls and do a very gentle “hike” around the park. But my identifying intersections are what make me an amazing person that deserves to travel the world. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.