The Fat Black Woman's Poems

"This book has always been a real in-house favorite. In terms of thinking about what Virago does well, we always have excellent writing and we like to publish things that are provocative, funny, and surprising. This book is all of those things. There’s a poem in here called “Spring”. It’s about having been quite ill and scared over the winter and venturing out into the spring. The last three lines are: “I unbolted the door and stepped outside/only to have that daffodil baby/kick me in the eye.” She’s expecting spring to be all soft and lovely, but the daffodil kicks her in the eye after this difficult winter. I think that this collection, although it’s filled with beauty and laughter, also does kick you in the eye sometimes. Even the title is quite provocative. The first poems are about beauty and reframing our ideas about it. It’s reframing the idea of who the fat black woman is or could be, and how we look at her. It’s an amazing book of poetry, and it feels so central to what we do. We no longer publish any poetry on the frontlist—mainly because being a poetry editor is quite a specialist thing—but we really love the poetry on our backlist. We have Grace Nichols; we have some Maya Angelou; we have Anne Carson. We have incredible poets and this is something that we thought would be great to have as part of the Five Gold Reads. Another thing that made this book special for me is that we ran a reading group in conjunction with Women for Refugee Women , which is a charity that our author Natasha Walter set up. We read some of these poems in that reading group with women refugees from all over the world. That was a really amazing reading group, so these poems have a special resonance for some of us as well."