Molly Fisk Reviews Samantha Zighelboim's Fat Sonnets

At The Rumpus, Molly Fisk takes a close look at Samantha Zighelboim's debut poetry collection, The Fat Sonnets. "If you were very angry and if you were in love with language—close as a familiar, deft as Serena placing a tennis ball—and you were an American woman," Fisk writes, "you might write poems like the poems in Samantha Zighelboim’s debut collection, The Fat Sonnets." Picking up from there: 

In full disclosure, I weigh more than Arnold Schwarzenegger and am eating breakfast as I read them for the first time.

What does it feel like to eat and not think
about eating?

How to tell you about the book without going off on the relevant tangents of the fat-shaming culture we live in, how much money is made by the weight-loss industry (not to mention the beauty industry, both being focused on what is wrong with women’s bodies), and the medical myths surrounding so-called obesity? Because whatever the subject might be, this is a book of poetry, and the poems are the gift. They don’t exist without content, of course—a crust without blackberries is no pie—but to analyze cultural issues surrounding fatness just because Zighelboim addresses them so directly would miss the point.

Pale fiction in a half-hidden full-length mirror,
dim lights.

The poems in The Fat Sonnets are by turns straightforward and oblique, funny and scathing, terribly sad and joyful, traditional and twisting, turning, somersaulted take-offs on sonnets. While they engage consistently with the sonnet form, they also come at us from many angles: erasure poems of nineteenth century medical texts and a list of late-night binge delivery orders. The lineup of daily weight-tracking that every dieter’s written a thousand times, a litany of diet’s names, a roll-call of euphemisms, descriptions of food and meals that will make you salivate, descriptions of self-loathing that will make you groan in recognition—if you’ve ever been fat, if you’ve ever been human—and want to weep. I loved the range of Zighelboim’s expression: from very formal to culturally cool (one poem based on a lyric from a Rihanna song, one on a painting by Lucian Freud), and intimate, bald-faced, familiar.

Continue reading at The Rumpus.