Krisha Shah

18010200
BBA LLB A 2018

Blythe Baird’s poetry collection If My Body Could Speak

Blythe Baird is a brilliant writer who has learnt to turn all the sufferings of her life
into poetry. Her collection touches on the same topics that many teenage woman readers face
such as acceptance of the body, recognition of sexuality, survival of abuse, and learning to
respect yourself, considering everything else that confirms the opposite. This book places
things in context on the external appearance and breaks the taboos and notions while
provoking the feelings of positivity. Blythe as an author is inherently unpretentious and less
focused with trying to impress the reader through clever writing or wordplay, she instead
focuses more on inciting a dialogue through her work. Her work is comprehensible and easy
to relate with, whilst also being easy to read. The bluntness and conversational overtone
throughout her writing is an integral aspect worthy of appreciation. It tends to feel as if the
author pours out her heart through her work, which I feel contains a lot of courage and
strength of character. Like several other slam poets, she focuses on making her poetry widely
available, engaging and alluring even to someone who has no interest in literature.

Baird's poems represent her own experience and history with eating disorders as Baird
was an obese girl, constantly made fun off who then had become anorexic in high school. It
was just after her 17th birthday that she started composing poems as a means of explaining
her eating disorder. As she says she's writing to recover and that It’s motivating to make my
experiences live outside of me and that poetry is a form through which she can perceive her
life." The appeal of Baird's poems rests a great deal in the manner that Baird questions the
societal norms that promote or reinforce female objectification. Her work is mesmerizing, not
only because they are well composed, but because they are truthful, candid and ground
breaking, in a world where women are frequently being posed either as damsels that are in
distress in need of being saved or as super woman that would not need a partner or
companion in their lives. The basic, conversational voice of the in her work and poems
invokes feelings of a legitimate therapy session.
When The Fat Girl Gets Skinny is the first poem in the book, and it starts with the statement
"since I only feel pretty when I'm starving." The poem is all about a girl who, after years of
being fat shamed and humiliated, discovers how the only time people were appreciative of
her was when she lost a lot of weight that her father started keeping her before and after
pictures in his pocket. This could sound silly, but being in this situation is incredibly
traumatic. No one ever really asks or acknowledges the possibility that she might be suffering
from an eating illness; rather, she is regarded as a mentor. The sentence "how could I not be
in love with my sickness?" was devastating, pointing a finger at the future suicidal impulses
of someone who has been body shamed. Baird's poem is inspired by her own history of being
fat-shamed when she was obese and how her life changed after she lost all that weight.
“When I got slim, people instantly saw me as beautiful and worth knowing,” she says. It was
impossible for me not to accept my fat loss to be the happiest thing to ever happen to me.”

“Has anorexia still silently boiling within me?” she asks. Anorexia is a known mental
disorder in which a person constricts their consumption of food due to the fear of becoming
overweight. Anorexics have a skewed view of their bodies. Although there are a variety of
reasons for this, the media's slimness culture reinforces the notion and essentially body
shames people into malnourishment. “Was there a justification I mistook the sirens of my
tummy for audience clapping?” Baird puts it beautifully. Her best poems are those that
describe her battle with anorexia. She starts and ends with poems about this struggle, which is
particularly surprising. Baird's popularity in the slam poetry world was based on these poems.
Her poem When the Fat Girl Gets Skinny has received millions of hits on the internet,
rendering her one of the most well-known and sought-after Button Poems authors. It's not all
about losing weight after being overweight. As seen in the words, "We realized the many
ways a mother's shame can torment a daughter's body," It's about a mother's worry that can
cause fear and self-pity in a teenage girl. The psychological effect of a parent's attitude about
their children is important, and the perception of themselves that children shape in their
minds is heavily influenced by the image presented to them by their parents. Baird's
experience surviving in an atmosphere where weight and food were regular discussions in her
life influenced the poem. Her parents' efforts to support her lose weight, in fact, worsened her
eating illness.
 I'd like to save this book because the way I feel about this book is because of my
relatability. At the end of the day, I realized how necessary it is to accept oneself and this
book has encouraged me on many occasions. These poems will live with me for a long time
because of the impact it managed to create on me.