fat magic by Alessandra Nysether-Santos
Limited edition print copy from the 2025 Garden Party Chapbook Contest!
Shipping in Fall 2025!
cover art: Fruit Babes Collage by Shelby Bergen
A dazzling debut, fat magic is a fierce, lyrical debut that reclaims fatness as sacred inheritance. Nysether-Santos transforms trauma into tenderness and self-love into radical power. Through tanka, sestinas, and raw confessions, this chapbook dismantles diet culture with glittering defiance—a poetic uprising for anyone who’s ever been told to shrink.
Alessandra Nysether-Santos (they/she) is a Brazilian American and Jersey Italian writer, artist, and educator living in Florida with her husband, dog, and two cats. Alessandra was a semi-finalist in the 2025 Lefty Blondie Press: Broadside Series and earned an honorable mention in the 2024 Jaki Shelton Green Poetry Performance Prize. They have poems published in places like North Carolina Literary Review, Jersey Devil Press, and Até Mais: An Anthology of Latinx Futurisms. When they aren’t wandering in the woods and writing down their dreams, Alessandra is facilitating community offerings like creative workshops, faith formation sessions at their local Unitarian Universalist church, and moon circles. She is on Instagram @hashtagalessandra
Praise for fat magic:
In fat magic Alessandra Nysether-Santos invites readers into the boldness, ceremony, and healing that is “fatness.” Each poem is an upheaval of joy and reconciliation with the power of our bodies. Working in narrative and lyrical forms, Nysether-Santos shows their skill in a series of interconnected tankas, and other structures, like the sestina, and Jericho Brown’s duplex form. They take us through their own history in “fatness,” so readers understand the oppressive “slaughter” when we view female bodies as commodities. In a society obsessed with weight, these poems confront the part of us that sits in judgement of ourselves and others. In metaphors that parallel fatness with fire and water, the poems ultimately seek to move readers into celebrating fatness as a power. In the poem, “before and after pictures,” Nysether-Santos writes, we expect fat bodies “to be transformed.” Then they graciously guide us through the politics of our hyper focus on weight to “whatever it is that happens next.” We learn from these poems that what happened first was a childhood of body shaming and bullying. Nysether-Santos writes to friends and enemies, to anyone who needs to hear it that we must reconsider our hate and fear of our bodies. The problem is the root, and so it also the solution. Afterall, Eve taking a bite out of an apple ignited original sin. This book will ignite readers with gems like “if emotional eating were a sport” and “fat women utopia,” two of my favorites. These poems are smart and dangerous. I didn’t know I’d been missing the veracity and boldness of Nysether-Santos’s voice until I read this book.
-Amber Flora Thomas, Eye of Water: Poems
Alessandra Nysether-Santos’ debut chapbook, fat magic, is both a dare and a powerful reclaiming: “go on and say it,” they write. A dare to look shame and trauma in its face, to name it—harm turned outwards against itself until it is not disappeared, but remade. With elements of confessional poetry, body horror and shapeshifting forms, fat magic’s spellwork leaves us all more expansive and glad for it. In these pages, Nysether-Santos reworks the world with a hard-won “audacious faith” entirely their own. Here, there is room enough for our belonging, our pleasure, and we remember what it is to “be startlingly human.”
-Kim Sousa, Always A Relic Never A Reliquary
In fat magic, Alessandra Nysether-Santos uses lush, defiant language to weave a garment big enough to fit the biggest woman. “My body / is an archipelago in the bath,” they say, imagining the fat body as bigger still. This collection reminds the reader that our bodies connect us with people who came before us. There is no curse of fatness here. Instead, in Nysether-Santos’s poetic world, our fat bodies “are heirlooms from before” that shuns society’s too small expectations and “follow older rules.” In order to break free from the molds fat women are expected to fit into, Nysether-Santos conjures a limitless space, where there is no smaller woman inside waiting to break out. The subversive speaker declares that “i am no cursed creature / not a monster with an arc / of transformation” and “there is no small pond / I am no big fish / I am a shoreline.” In a small world that expects fat women to become smaller, Nysether-Santos wants to welcome the reader into a “fat woman utopia!” where someone is always whispering “you are loved / you are loved.”
-Aline Mello, More Salt than Diamond
