Fat Girl Forms - by Stephanie Rogers (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Written entirely in traditional and invented forms, Stephanie Rogers' Fat Girl Forms explores how it feels to move one's body in a world not built to hold it. She examines the way society humiliates fat women, especially those who don't conform to conventional standards of beauty. Brash, sassy, and in your face, this second full-length collection depicts one fat woman's challenge to a culture that constantly tells them that they are unwanted, unloved, unworthy, all of this done in verse forms full of panache and élan.

Review Quotes

"Stephanie Rogers has accomplished something remarkable: She has written poems that make the reader feel a body's burden, force, and pleasure. The body belongs to a woman who lives in a world where she is attacked, desired, humiliated, ignored because her body doesn't fit some mythic norm. The Fat Girl of the poems understands exactly her effect on the gaze of others; this knowledge gives her power. The power sings in these sharply crafted poems--furious, sad, confrontational, lustful, vulnerable, at last ready to shed the world's judgment and accept her own. Fat Girl Forms is a necessary book, like no other." --Kathleen Ossip

"Stephanie Rogers has gifted us a majestically conceived collection--one I've been craving as both a reader and teacher of poetry. On a formal level, we are treated to an agile survey of traditions in meter, syllabics, and rhyme. On a thematic level, these poems stay faithful to a specific, fully realized protagonist as they examine society's relentless critique of weight as a measure of worth. "Each day, I wake to ready / my body / to devour the sun's heat," the speaker of "Fat Girl Ovillejo" observes, "to eat / the thick and dripping light." Shifts in perspective and focal distance keep the material fresh, prompting its audience to ask: why have we not had this conversation before? This fearless, formidable, and necessary book claims its essential moment." --Sandra Beasley

About the Author

Stephanie Rogers is the author of Plucking the Stinger (2016) and Fat Girl Forms (2021), both published by Saturnalia Books. She grew up in Middletown, Ohio and was educated at The Ohio State University and the University of Cincinnati. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Georgia Review, Ploughshares, Tin House, Poetry Northwest, Shenandoah, New Ohio Review, and elsewhere. She lives outside of Nashville in Lebanon, TN.