Paul Vermeersch

The Fat Kid Paul Vermeersch

Chronicling a childhood troubled by obesity, poor body image, and low self-esteem, this collection of poetry reveals how the media's perfect faces, societal expectations, family concerns, and primitive socialization rituals collide with the 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 oneself? 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. Through these poems, Calvin Little becomes the ideal antihero for a shallow culture obsessed with thin.