Even before the publication of the internationally acclaimed Country of My Skull, the South African writer Antjie Krog established her reputation as one of the most important poets in her mother tongue, Afrikaans. To date she has published ten volumes of poetry in Afrikaans; her most recent volume Verweerskrif (2006) was published simultaneously with its English translation Body Bereft. One of the most conspicuous traits of Krog’s career as a writer, which started with the publication of her debut volume of poetry in 1970, has been the way in which her writing engaged with its socio-political context. Another characteristic of her poetry is the strong emphasis it places on the representation of the female body, something which culminated in the volume Body Bereft. This paper focuses on the way in which the depiction of the grotesque female body in Krog’s work can be seen as part of her engagement with the aesthetics and ethics of liberation, reconciliation and transformation in South Africa. The argument developed in this paper makes use of Bakhtin’s theory of the grotesque and the carnivalesque, as worked out in his work on Rabelais (Rabelais and his World). Because of Bakhtin’s emphasis on the grotesque body as a social body, his theory of the grotesque has been interpreted by various scholars as a theory of the social and the political. This paper investigates whether Krog’s transgressions of an ‘official’ aesthetic regarding the depiction of the female body during the course of her poetic career can be seen as another way in which she engaged with the socio-political domain in South Africa from 1970 onwards.