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

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In one of the poems that she loved to read a decade ago, performing it even on BET Def Poetry Jam – the young poet imagines herself in the future – the kind of woman she would like to become. This poem chosen for the BBC 100 showcase was a reading for the BBC programme Woman's Hour broadcast on 31st July, 1986. At best, such roles allow her a kind of folksy wisdom, but never intellect or theoretical complexity.

Which cultures, which counter ideas of beauty and wit, which alternative exercises of intelligence are (purposely or inadvertently) excluded from its small remit? When I first started reading the poems I was indifferent, but the more I read the more I liked them.The cover may have some limited signs of wear but the pages are clean, intact and the spine remains undamaged.

I am someone whose daily work tries to create beauty rather than dismantle the flawed systems by which we appreciate such beauty. Even Walcott did – he who was so often seen as the most English of us, the Caribbean poet most comfortable to embrace Western tradition. What is so wonderful here is not only that she casts her present self as her future lover but that the self that she transforms into is none other than the Fat Black Woman, this embodiment of so many of Staceyann Chin’s poetics – the impoliteness, the brazenness, the sheer volume of it.As the title suggests, she explores being out of place in a white, thin world, as well as taking joy in the unique beauty of being a fat black woman. I am certain that it isn’t a fault of memory but the poems in Johannesburg were not the ones I had heard in Jamaica. 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. OVERALL: It is a short/thin, accessible book, which would be good for those starting to explore poetry as well as poetry-lovers.

Of critical importance here is the critical language which we continue to use in reviewing discourse, words we offer up in our assessment of whether a poem or a collection is good or bad, words that pretend to be neutral but are burdened with so much history – words that I have hinted at before like subtle, quiet, restrained, elegant. Sometimes the critic in me feels that this whole business of aesthetics has been so deeply hurtful that we should do away with it completely, if only to stop those ripples that have never stopped spreading since the stone of chattel slavery was dropped into the waters of our collective humanity. Performance teachers are often brought in to teach poets how to read their own poems – how to let the words rise off the page, but back then I was learning the lesson in reverse.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.

I haven’t travelled for a long time but now I worry about antisemitism, which is something I hardly ever thought about in the past. 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. The Fat Black Woman would like to hear a good old-fashioned bawl – a screaming out – and then to be lulled by those sleepless droning red-eyed wake nights. I find it hard to rate memoirs and review them because there isn’t a way to rate someone else’s life. By the time I met her again in South Africa, it was as if she had accepted that she would never publish a collection, that she was more of an activist than she was an author.I want to challenge that old and unrelenting aesthetic that has tried (whether knowingly or not) to set limits on the volume at which good poetry can be pitched. I received a diferente cover than the one in the product page but, to be honest, I rather prefer mine! 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. And there was something so nervous and vulnerable and exciting about her, the way she carried with her this energy that would never ebb. To believe in the progress of the victimised is to believe that only now have they advanced to the point of deserving greater inclusion.