The Fat Kid
Files
Document Type
Book
Description
Poetry kills the beautiful people. The Fat Kid, Paul Vermeersch’s second full-length collection of poetry, chronicles a childhood troubled by obesity, poor body image, and low self-esteem. The media’s perfect faces, societal expectations, family concerns, and primitive socialization rituals collide with the already horrendous physical and emotional tribulations of adolescence to drive Calvin Little over the edge. He’ll stop at nothing to become beautiful and weightless, but he must conceal his battle with what the world has come to know as a girl’s disease. Is there redemption in social acceptance, in romantic love, in escaping gravity? Is it enough to learn to love yourself? Calvin’s journey is told in a sequence of poems steeped in both the physical and psychological worlds, in voices that range from the bawdy to the elegiac. In The Fat Kid Calvin Little becomes the ideal antihero — for a shallow culture obsessed with thin.
ISBN
9781550225150
Publication Date
4-2002
Publisher
ECW Press
Keywords
poems, poetry
Disciplines
Arts and Humanities | Creative Writing | Poetry
Faculty
Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences (FHASS)
Copyright
© ECW Press
SOURCE Citation
Vermeersch, Paul, "The Fat Kid" (2002). Books & Chapters. 7.
https://source.sheridancollege.ca/fhass_books/7
Original Citation
Vermeersch, P. (2002). The fat kid. ECW Press.
