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Anglophone Caribbean woman poet Grace Nichols's first book, i is a long memoried woman, which was awarded the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1983, depicts the experience of slavery in a long-poem sequence. In the book, Nichols appropriates the traditional epic style, which is mainly considered a male domain in British literary history. In her challenge to this patriarchal domain, Nichols narrates the collective identities of female slaves via multiple poetic personas, use of creolized English, and choral forms of the African oral tradition. She focuses on representing the wounded female body not only as the very site of slave memory but also as a locus of recovery. Nichols refuses and dissolves the images of slave women as miserable victims through these poetic strategies of representation. Finally, Nichols creates a new female image with her synthetic power.