This collection was a random pick but as I was reading it I kept waiting for the moment that it felt worthy of acclaim. I must acknowledge that as a white cis man, I don't believe myself to be the intended audience for these works. However, my main issue wasn't the content as much as feeling these works were bogged down by the clickbait pitfalls of maintaining what can only be described as an "insta-poetry" / a social media aesthetic that's easily retweeted.

A strong collection of poetry.The poets writing on being a woman the gifts the struggles the pain.Well written thoughtful a book I will be recommending.#netgalley #eccobooks

This is a tricky collection to rate. The content is important but also gut-wrenching. Some of the poems are difficult to get through because of the content. That being said, it is also beautifully written. I can't wait to read more by Ama Asantewa Diaka.

**I received an eARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Big thanks to NetGalley and the publisher!

Some of the language in this collection made it hard for me to connect. I'm not one to view womanhood through a connection to reproductive organs, so all the focus on uteruses kept pulling me out of the work.

Presented solely as words on the page, I would give these poems overall three stars. There are themes of the female body - in pain, in pleasure - the black body, moving between worlds. Quite a few of the poems repeat in thematic material although I did appreciate the varieties of structure and length.

But Ama Asantewa Diaka sees herself as a storyteller, not just a poet, and reading the words on the page is only part of the experience. The experience of her work is much more enticing, and I'd encourage you to watch a video or two.

https://afrowomenpoetry.net/en/2018/08/30/poetra-ama-asantewa-diaka-2/

This was a lovely debut collection, although a little bit uneven. Some poems were incredibly well-done, moving, and beautiful, while others weren't. This author experiments a lot with style in this collection. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but I'm not sure it always works. I do think the topics explored in the poems are really important ones, and readers can feel how deeply personal this collection is for the author through her words.

Woman, Eat Me Whole is a complex but approachable collection of poems about womanhood, trauma, motherhood, and feminism, ranging from Ghana to the U.S. Regardless of your familiarity with poetry, this collection is moving and inventive. It definitely left me wanting to read more of Ama Asantewa Diaka's work!

What a wonderful and engrossing little book! These poems were Glorious, Heartbreaking, Funny, and Beautiful in equal measure. And I absolutely did eat this collection of poems whole (in almost one sitting!)

I found the progression of theme in this book to be lovely, and the style experiments to be fun and pretty effective. I think I had a few issues in my digital copy, but nothing that really hampered my enjoyment. The discussion of the Body as something separate from the Self is something I was very into, alien themes are welcome, especially in this not-necessarily-negative way. Exploration of the Body as an alien and the feelings of that alien read like nothing I've read before, and I was loving it. I was also loving the poems where Diaka is raging against the injustices of the menstrual cycle! It does sometimes really feel like it's out for BLOOD you know.

There was a perfect touch of humor in this, and there were also some poems that hurt me in such a good way, so I am extremely grateful for having the chance to read an advance copy of this in exchange for this honest review! I loved it and will be reading it again and also reading whatever else Diaka writes!

This collection explores a lot of important topics like feminism, generational wealth, and the ways society polices and expects so much from women and their bodies. While I know the author is speaking from her own experiences, I found the language around womanhood a little offputting in the ways it focused so much on having female sex characteristics like a uterus. I don't want to say this was intentionally exclusive at all, but I wish there had been a bit less of that. Ama used a few experimental forms like medical reports, definitions, and tweets, some of which worked for me and some didn't. I also found that almost all of the poems were very obvious in their meaning. I wish she would've trusted the readers more to make some of them more subtle, to be able to focus more on language than being so explicit with meaning. I would still recommend this collection, especially as a good intro to poetry! Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

"We become art in an attempt to skip the death chair
We become poets in an attempt to skip shrink sessions
We become rappers in an attempt to transform
our manifestos into a way of being
We become nuanced in an attempt to get the bigger picture"

I'm not a huge fans of poems about poetry but Ama Asantewa Diaks is an exquisite writer. So many books right now are being written on a single subject with poems completely indistinguishable from each other. Ama Asantewa Diaka has so many different formats: Stage directions, a series of definitions, medical records, remixes, social media posts, epistolaries, multi-columned poems. The shifting styles made this book seem more alive than many of its contemporaries.

This is the kind of book that should be taught in schools.

This was a unique book of poetry from an author who has had a completely different life than I have, and so I don't think I completely understood all of her poems, though I greatly appreciated the small paragraphs that follow some poems, explaining the meaning behind the poems.

Woman, Eat Me Whole is a poetry collection by author Ama Asantewa Diaka with feminist themes. I'm rating it two stars because I wanted to like the full collection but some of the poems just weren't for me. I definitely preferred the shorter poems in this collection. The thing was that there were some that were amazing, that I truly loved and even highlighted to come back to. But then the longer ones would throw me off because they felt like someone talking and not in a good way. Thank you to the author and the publisher for the opportunity to read this work.

Woman, Eat me Whole by Ghanaian poet Ama Asantewa Diaka is a raw and blunt collection of poetry that explores what it means to be a woman.

Diaka plays with different poetic formats and lengths and her poems are full of honesty. She does address a lot of trauma and negative emotions along with the empowering ideals.

I am not a fan of this particular type of poetry, but it is a strong collection with a beautiful striking cover.

This collection of poetry had some gems in it, but overall felt very reductive and overdone. I understand the writer was trying to capture the universal components of women's experience, but it just didn't really work for me.

Thank you to Netgalley and Ecco publishing for sending me an e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Let me just start off by admiring the cover. This cover is what originally caught my attention. It's so bright and eye-catching and mesmerizing. And the title is another attention-grabber. I can't think of the words to describe the emotions that the cover and title combined make me feel.

Once you get past the cover, and open the book? The layout. The way these poems are written and stylized was unique and made me love what I was reading even more. Words hold power, and these words were some of the most powerful I've read in a while.

Woman, Eat Me Whole by Ama Asantewa Diaka is a powerful collection of poetry focused on the power and pain of being a woman. In it the poet calls on past trauma, feminism, and a deep spiritual belief to create meaningful verse. The poems that most resonated with me were "Love Yourself", "Mathematician", and "That-Which-Must-Not-Be-Named". I highly recommend this collection!


Advanced copy provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

"This body has survived you loving it only some days"
Anatomy of a Body Ama Asantewa Diaka



This poetry collection was very interesting to me. I loved that there were poems describing the stories of Ghanian women included along with the more personal stories Diaka tells. I didn't understand some of the metaphors Diaka chose to include but that could be a cultural misunderstanding. My favorite poems from the collections were "God in Every Nook", "Anatomy of a Body", "Our Father Who Art In Heaven", "Saltwater", and "A Utopia for Black Girls" ("how wide the soul stretches when the body has freedom to move! / what is breaking loose to a free spirit?)

ARC provided by NetGalley! Thank you so much for the copy!

So, I'm not particularly well-versed when it comes to poetry. One of my goals for this year was to get more into it, and this was the first real poetry collection I've read this year. Overall, I really enjoyed it. Unlike most books where I can have fairly objective opinions, I find that it's hard to properly work through feelings that I have about poetry, and this is something that's gone back all the way to middle school English.

Still, I blew through this book in one sitting. This collection focuses on womanhood, with emphasis on things that go into the experience of being a woman such as race, misogyny, motherhood, and pain. The pain aspect was the thing that I really enjoyed as I read, because it rings true. So much to being a woman or someone perceived as a woman by society is about pain, both suffering from it and enduring it because that's what you're supposed to do otherwise you're looked down upon.

Of note, from a nonbinary pov: it is important to go into this knowing that it doesn't factor in trans and nonbinary women at all. It didn't particularly bother me, but if you're going into this expecting poems about ALL women, that won't be found here. I don't really mind, as this collection is so insanely personal and focuses on the experience of the poet. There's a running theme of poetry about wombs, uteruses, eggs; it gets to the point where it feels like being a woman is being reduced down to just those things, despite it not being the universal experience, but as I sat with this I realized... that's exactly the point? That is how society treats womanhood, whether you have those things or not, and a lot of our value is placed on that. It's awful. It's outdated. It's pain.

Overall, I found a lot of this collection rather uneven. Some hit a lot, others kind of missed. The first few didn't really resonate, then I remembered that I'd read that the author does spoken word and I was able to SEE how that influences these poems, and it instantly improved my experience.

Standout Poems:
- The Audacity of Men (by far my favorite)
- Jigsaw
- Love Yourself
- False Teachings
- Sum
- That-Which-Must-Not-Be-Named

“In the end, we are all ordinary people in disguise.”
Woman, Eat Me Whole is a collection of poems written by Ama Asantewa Diaka. I enjoyed the mixed media format. One downside to ebooks is that some poetry books aren’t formatted correctly. That was not the case with this book.
(Arc from NetGalley)

What a thoughtful and fascinating compilation of work.

I feel like Woman, Eat Me Whole was unlike any compilation I've read before. The imagery was beautiful and painful. For those that have uterus and experience the pains of a female body - the poems are quite apt at describing the experience.

There is something just so strong about the writing, that I am eager to see what comes next from this author.

My one point of feedback is that this book is based on females (sex) and not women (gender), so could be exclusionary of trans women. However, knowing that the author is of a different culture than I - maybe an author's note would have gone a long way in address this?