Eat Me: Patience Agbabi

This 33-slide lesson explores Patience Agbabi’s poem, ‘Eat Me’.

Students begin by discussing key ideas around the relationship between sex and food and society’s beauty standards. We then learn about Agbabi’s work before delving into the poem and establishing its narrative.

The lesson then guides students methodically through extensive key ideas related to the poem, including title analysis; intertextual allusions; analysis of language; and analysis of form, structure, rhythm and rhyme. The nature of the dramatic monologue as a form is also discussed, before looking closely at some of the poem’s key images and the use of repetition. Each character in the poem is then dissected, while also looking at key symbols in the poem (eg. the cake, the bed). We also discuss the poem’s colonial undertones.

Students are given a list of key themes and key vocabulary to facilitate high-level analysis. There are then some important questions for students to answer once they have explored the whole poem, and a list of potential poems which could be used to compare to ‘Eat Me’ to strengthen comparative analytical skills.

This resource is particularly useful for those studying ‘Poems of the Decade’ with Pearson, but could easily be used for any purpose.

Two files are included: one has the PowerPoint saved as a PDF so that the fonts and layout are firmly in place; the other is saved as a normal PPT file so that you can edit it.