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The Fat Sonnets
Samantha Zighelboim’s debut collection conducts a radical re-examination of what we mean by body. In these poems, body is noun, verb and adverb; body is dearly beloved and fiercely rejected; it is by turns a singularly beautiful process and a frightening object. Zighelboim takes the sonnet form as a loose premise, a la Bernadette Mayer, but then explodes, expands, defies and otherwise grows out of supposed formal limits, making language into a living embodiment of the refusal of (institutional, patriarchal, cultural) control. The poet’s refusal of the social invisibility of fat bodies is essential. “I am a perfect fucking blossom,” Zighelboim writes, and also “I am entitled to the loneliness of my interminable appetite.” Offering felt registers as subtle as “The oblique/ correspondence between/ a soft body/ and a thin/ layer of/ pulp,” this is the writing of a sharp and observant world-eater: a cosmophage in the truest sense.
PRAISE FOR THE FAT SONNETS
The Fat Sonnets are greathearted, wickedly brilliant, and wise. Samantha Zighelboim writes with rare passion and exactitude: she can cure, or kill what ails you, and yet she sings from the soul, which is beyond diagnosis, at once perfect; eternal and savagely hungry since whenever eternity began. Hilarious and cruel, every page swells with compassion. I love this book. It is deeply nutritious. It will feed you.
—Ariana Reines
Which stories do we tell, and which do we only pretend to tell? Samantha Zighelboim’s searing debut insists that words are flesh, that if there’s “no space for body on the barstool,” there will be “no space for body in the poetry.” In these poems, the fat body feeds on and feeds a slippery surfeit of language: Zighelboim reminds us that this body is made not just of “late night binge fantasy delivery orders,” but also of etymology, dreams, “petty silks,” diagnostic euphemisms, interspecies bonds, and “the fountain/ pen of a spinster.” Funhouse-mirror-reflections of Bernadette Mayer’s “skinny sonnets,” these fat sonnets swell with longing: a line becomes a paragraph; a poem splits down the middle like a calving iceberg, a calving body, a manatee floating “in that weightless, boring way.” But this book is anything but boring. Zighelboim’s narrator is too quick, too witty, too self-aware. “I am very charming sometimes,” she reminds us, slyly. “I am a perfect fucking blossom.”
—MC Hyland
PRAISE FOR THE FAT SONNETS
The Fat Sonnets are greathearted, wickedly brilliant, and wise. Samantha Zighelboim writes with rare passion and exactitude: she can cure, or kill what ails you, and yet she sings from the soul, which is beyond diagnosis, at once perfect; eternal and savagely hungry since whenever eternity began. Hilarious and cruel, every page swells with compassion. I love this book. It is deeply nutritious. It will feed you.
—Ariana Reines
Which stories do we tell, and which do we only pretend to tell? Samantha Zighelboim’s searing debut insists that words are flesh, that if there’s “no space for body on the barstool,” there will be “no space for body in the poetry.” In these poems, the fat body feeds on and feeds a slippery surfeit of language: Zighelboim reminds us that this body is made not just of “late night binge fantasy delivery orders,” but also of etymology, dreams, “petty silks,” diagnostic euphemisms, interspecies bonds, and “the fountain/ pen of a spinster.” Funhouse-mirror-reflections of Bernadette Mayer’s “skinny sonnets,” these fat sonnets swell with longing: a line becomes a paragraph; a poem splits down the middle like a calving iceberg, a calving body, a manatee floating “in that weightless, boring way.” But this book is anything but boring. Zighelboim’s narrator is too quick, too witty, too self-aware. “I am very charming sometimes,” she reminds us, slyly. “I am a perfect fucking blossom.”
—MC Hyland
- GenresPoetry
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Published June 1, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
May 21, 2018
Fat Sonnets is not officially out yet but I got it at AWP and devoured it in one sitting. The poems are called sonnets though many of the poems subvert the sonnet, condensing themselves into one or two lines or stretching beyond 14 lines. The sonnet is like Spanx: a constriction the poems—like the fat body—is constantly spilling out of. These poems explore—with beautiful and brilliant honesty and vulnerability—how the world is experienced by a fat woman in 2018. I found myself laughing and crying and sighing in recognition while rdg this book. The fat body is the body that most Americans inhabit, and yet it is a body that is perpetually erased from the landscape. Zighelboim writes: “Fat people are the most visible invisibles.” Everyone should read this book!
June 13, 2018
I’m so happy that poems about womanhood and the fat body are FINALLY getting some much deserved attention, and these poems are crafted by the most capable, evocative hands.
June 29, 2018
These poems are beautiful, frightening, thought-provoking, shiver-inducing, sensuous, and evocative. And that doesn't begin to describe them. Using an inventive variety of poetic forms, and language that ranges from simple declarations of fact to hard-edged analysis to lush description, Samantha Zighelboim draws her readers into the experience of an overweight woman in America today. She declares, “I am a fat woman. I am the fattest woman/who ever lived.” She analyzes, “Excess has/reduced this/obstructive/silhouette to/an abundance/of disorders.” And she lists, “Late-Night Binge Fantasy Delivery Orders,” meticulously lists restaurants and her favorite orders, with no commentary, just a list. In “Milestone Map,” she uses yo-yoing lines to chronicle her weight.
This makes for a very powerful book of poetry. But she does more. In “A Sensible Lunch,” she's eating “brown rice and a turkey meatball,” but the rest of the poem is a celebration of both food and language. Here's a description of a Korean rice dish: “. . . the tender cooked grains/soaked in warm butter and then torched with/beef braising liquid topped with a soft-boiled egg/and gossamer slices of soy-drenched beef shank.” This is an alternative vision – not a fat woman who can't stop herself, but a woman who appreciates, revels in, savors excellent food.
In my favorite poem of the collection, “Fat Dream with Blue Whale,” this vision blossoms into a magnificent, powerful whale, who together with a companion, (loneliness is another motif) consumes massive amounts of food and seawater, which is the fuel for all this immense beauty:
. . . We the collosals, our hearts so big a person
could swim through our arteries, thick walls of warm blubber padding
the enormity of our bodies. Nothing as large as we has even lived in this
world. The power of that immensity is an understanding between us, a quiet
knowledge that our size is our life force, and with it we rule these seas.
This makes for a very powerful book of poetry. But she does more. In “A Sensible Lunch,” she's eating “brown rice and a turkey meatball,” but the rest of the poem is a celebration of both food and language. Here's a description of a Korean rice dish: “. . . the tender cooked grains/soaked in warm butter and then torched with/beef braising liquid topped with a soft-boiled egg/and gossamer slices of soy-drenched beef shank.” This is an alternative vision – not a fat woman who can't stop herself, but a woman who appreciates, revels in, savors excellent food.
In my favorite poem of the collection, “Fat Dream with Blue Whale,” this vision blossoms into a magnificent, powerful whale, who together with a companion, (loneliness is another motif) consumes massive amounts of food and seawater, which is the fuel for all this immense beauty:
. . . We the collosals, our hearts so big a person
could swim through our arteries, thick walls of warm blubber padding
the enormity of our bodies. Nothing as large as we has even lived in this
world. The power of that immensity is an understanding between us, a quiet
knowledge that our size is our life force, and with it we rule these seas.
March 6, 2024
At its formal base, Zighelboim’s book is a constant investigation about the body inside the body, what does that really mean, and what would that body look like. It’s an interesting approach for a book of sonnets that take many different forms. A sonnet as a 14-stanza poem. A sonnet as a 14 line poem, with a slim poem located at the left margin, and a wider poem coming after the caesura. A sonnet whose opening quatrain considers a different definition of “fat.” Zighelboim is as inventive with the sonnet form as she is with her consideration of shame and self-affirmation and perplexity. What is a “fat body”? What in this world is the “fat body” having to contend with constantly? And what image is evoked when the poet proposes that the “fat body” holds a “real body” inside it?
And Zighelboim’s formal innovation isn’t just around the poem’s shape on the page. The sonnets perform their love for the benefit of that body within the body. In that triangulation of poet-addressee-audience that I’ve read about in Jonathan Culler’s Theory of the Lyric, the poet of this book walks the poem through a number of registers. Her personal history with body and food. The pressures she’s felt from the culture around her. The puzzle that exists between visibility and invisibility living within that culture. The love relationship with or the desire to contact that inside body, for the poet to show how she values her inner body, this is the performance. The book is especially adept at that space between body positivity and shame and anxiety about where she is in a world that has so many feelings about people who are “fat.” Like there’s this view into the poet’s daily life that feels so remarkably attuned to the challenges of being overweight, living with what others see in overweight people and what that person can hear them telling her. It’s a complicated arrangement. And in the midst of all this, she sees herself, and the sonnets are love poems to that inner self, whose body she knows very well. the poet occupies this between space of body positivity. On one hand, she understands how she should be fashioning her attitude. But that doesn’t meet the reality. But there’s also the fact she’s writing these poems about how she sees other people seeing her body, and how that affects how she sees her body. So she is owning that space.
And the book ends recognizing the body as this “temple” (the last poem refers to this). Which I definitely like. In the way it raises the poet’s energy and presence, how it reacts to the world around her, how the mass of her is as much a testament to who she is as her desire to not be that mass. For sure, that is the power of the book. How it fits between self-awareness and the struggle to not sink into the life of dread.
And Zighelboim’s formal innovation isn’t just around the poem’s shape on the page. The sonnets perform their love for the benefit of that body within the body. In that triangulation of poet-addressee-audience that I’ve read about in Jonathan Culler’s Theory of the Lyric, the poet of this book walks the poem through a number of registers. Her personal history with body and food. The pressures she’s felt from the culture around her. The puzzle that exists between visibility and invisibility living within that culture. The love relationship with or the desire to contact that inside body, for the poet to show how she values her inner body, this is the performance. The book is especially adept at that space between body positivity and shame and anxiety about where she is in a world that has so many feelings about people who are “fat.” Like there’s this view into the poet’s daily life that feels so remarkably attuned to the challenges of being overweight, living with what others see in overweight people and what that person can hear them telling her. It’s a complicated arrangement. And in the midst of all this, she sees herself, and the sonnets are love poems to that inner self, whose body she knows very well. the poet occupies this between space of body positivity. On one hand, she understands how she should be fashioning her attitude. But that doesn’t meet the reality. But there’s also the fact she’s writing these poems about how she sees other people seeing her body, and how that affects how she sees her body. So she is owning that space.
And the book ends recognizing the body as this “temple” (the last poem refers to this). Which I definitely like. In the way it raises the poet’s energy and presence, how it reacts to the world around her, how the mass of her is as much a testament to who she is as her desire to not be that mass. For sure, that is the power of the book. How it fits between self-awareness and the struggle to not sink into the life of dread.
November 26, 2019
A short collection of original and complex variety of poems all on the theme of weight and fat, bodies and food, The Fat Sonnets is a strong offering by poet Samantha Zighelboim. The pain, guilt, longing and striving, the momentary acceptance and resignation all appear in these poems of exploring what it means to be a woman of size, judged, seen or not seen with hypercritical focus on one aspect of the self. The emotion that Zighelboim conveys struck deep and the range of styles and approaches to her subject impressed me with depth of observation and imagination. A clever and yet aching book well worth a read.
February 25, 2024
A collection of poems about the body, identity, the space we take up in the world, self-worth, and yes, being a fat girl.
from Offering: "We offer you / the thin ghosts / we have kept / in us all / our tired years. / Release them."
from Historiograhy: "Body binges / and body purges. Body wakes up and does it all over again. // Body the disorder. Body the monster. Body the rot. / Body such wasting."
from Two Photgraphs: "It was the summer of my thinnest year. / I'd finally mastered how to stay alive just / enough not to die. Look at those collar- / bones. That long neck. Those cheekbones."
from Offering: "We offer you / the thin ghosts / we have kept / in us all / our tired years. / Release them."
from Historiograhy: "Body binges / and body purges. Body wakes up and does it all over again. // Body the disorder. Body the monster. Body the rot. / Body such wasting."
from Two Photgraphs: "It was the summer of my thinnest year. / I'd finally mastered how to stay alive just / enough not to die. Look at those collar- / bones. That long neck. Those cheekbones."
October 13, 2023
Feels fucked up to call these poems delicious but they really were. I was stunned by many lines and how close they cut to my experiences, particularly the closely monitored refreshed cookie jar (mnm jar in my parents house but close enough). Devastating and healing in equal measure.
February 27, 2021
As a straight sized person, I don't feel this is a collection I can review well, so I won't, other than to say there's some excellent poems in here and I'm glad I read it.
July 31, 2021
"the unrelenting present tense" ! so wonderfully written, so tenderly crafted. I read this all at once & then a few poems over again.
November 6, 2025
What is a sonnet really? A 14-line poem? Does it need to rhyme? Can it be two six-line stanzas with a couplet wedged between? Can it be seven two-liners? Can it be four three-line stanzas followed by a couplet? Can it be 14 lines twice over? Can you slice the stanza(s) vertically, slightly right of center? Again, what is a sonnet exactly? Frankly, it can be whatever you want it to be but it's how the sonnet resurfaces -- rethought and reshaped -- the makes this book most interesting to me. As a formalist who appreciates rule-breakers, "The Fat Sonnets" is instructive... and obsessive. And as someone who hates his own potbelly gut, the author's food obsessions (and fasting desires) are certainly not alien to my brain. I don't know if a list of late-night binge fantasies constitutes a poem, but I do appreciate how Samantha Zighelboim never tires of experimenting and approaching the sonnet and her topic anew. Ironically, my favorite parts of this collection are the "skinny" poems -- short stacks of words, a thumb's width wide, or single sentences that stretch across the page. That and her double sonnet, "Fat Dream With Blue Whale," which has such vivid imagery.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews