Fat Girl Forms

Reading Stephanie Rogers’s Fat Girl Forms, I am wondering about what, if any, models exist for grappling with the unresolved and ongoing body-shaming women experience that does not involve either a formulaic transformation (as in the before-and-after photo) or self-abasement and social banishment. Rogers documents the routine undermining of her personhood through the dehumanizing critical gaze of beloveds, thin wallflower girls, doctors with their body mass indexes, and cruel flight attendants. There is little precedence for a book on this subject matter that does not seek to reform the “unruly” body nor perform neoliberal body positivity messaging.

This book includes sonnets, ballades, odes, pantoums, and villanelles, but Rogers also writes in penta rima, couplets and acrostics, a striking range of forms that function as armor for the confessional. Rogers’s focus on traditional and invented forms is important because it asks us to consider form itself—form as violence, as containment, as a kind of standardization that renders everything outside deviant and unworthy. The speaker in these poems “struts,” “sways,” and “licks”; she rolls her eyes, pops Xanax, and, at times, directly addresses the reader: 

I got fat 
before he died and fatter after. What do you 
think of that 

bullshit? And yes I’m talking to you, reader. 
Do you want to weigh in? (I’ll ask again later.) 

These poems move between rage, strength, and indifference, but this too can feel like a performance of resilience. And yet, what do I want? Vulnerability where there is already so much? It’s clear that Rogers doesn’t quite trust the reader with her vulnerabilities, and why should she? She is not the kind of anti-hero literature has romanticized or rewarded. Instead, Rogers reverses the gaze to ask why “forms” in the world are built with such punishing and disciplinary surveillance or perhaps, the harsher criticism, with such little imagination.