Big Fat Brown Bitch

Longlisted for the 2024 Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry

NZ Listener Best Books of 2023

Admire my big fat brown body, bitches!
Admire it!

The Big Fat Brown Bitch runs, sleeps, cries, laughs, splits open. She is sitting in a garage in South Auckland with her two brothers and discussing the majestic architecture of atoms. She is playing an audio book of The Power of Positive Thinking at herself. She is jumping over the lazy dog. She is lying face down in the mud and doing an apology on behalf of us all. She is receiving an election-year visit and a death threat. She is strapped to the cross. She is turning into a werewolf. The Big Fat Brown Bitch is coming for you.

Tusiata Avia, author of Ockham-award-winning The Savage Coloniser Book, returns with a brilliant and eviscerating work. These are poems of defiance, confrontation, consolation, satire, sorrow and fury.

'Original, often ironical, self-critical, clear as a bell in style and, amazingly, very funny in the midst of real rage.' —NZ Listener