Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head: Shortlisted for the 2022 Felix Dennis Prize

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While reading this startling collection, there was much to learn and of things taken for granted in civilized society. In absolute awe of this mastery of language, poetry like this pulls your heart in a very dreamy way. the boy you went to school with, who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory, is holding a gun bigger than his body. It took me eight months to get through this because there were too many lines and entire poems that genuinely made me burst into tears.

Anche il tema del rifugiato ricorre e colpisce l’abilità dell’autrice di restituire immagini precise di un’esperienza che non ha fatto personalmente (figlia dei rifugiati somali è cresciuta nel Regno Unito). Throughout the poems, Shire uses Somali words when referencing traditional familial, cultural, and religious subjects. If you haven't read her debut chapbook Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth, you will have heard of her as a collaborator on Beyoncé's Lemonade and Black Is King.

or the traumatised immigrant "She listens to the clamoring voices, oh how blessed she is, how proud they are, how all their hopes depend on her, how walahi, all their dreams lie at her feet. Poems of migration, womanhood, trauma and resilience from the award-winning Somali British poet Warsan Shire, celebrated collaborator on Beyoncé's Lemonade and Black Is King .

The collection itself is split into four parts: “What Doesn’t Kill You,” “This is Not a Love Song,” “Are You There, God? In 2012 she represented Somalia at the Poetry Parnassus, the festival of the world poets at the Southbank, London. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. I reread it in 2021 and fell utterly in love with Shire, her ability to string sentences together, and find the right words and images for hauntingly sorrowful and desperate situations.

To say Warsan Shire’s first full-length poetry collection is ‘highly anticipated’ is an understatement. With arresting poetic language and visceral imagery, Shire’s long awaited collection will break your heart over and over agains as she addresses themes or migration, womanhood, familial relations fractured across the globe, and while trauma permeates the pages so does hope and the will to survive. After releasing two chapbooks and collaborating with Beyoncé on two of her biggest multimedia projects, expectations were high for Warsan Shire’s debut full-length poetry collection. That of the refugee "All these men between my legs, a gun, a promise, a lie, his name, his flag, his language, his manhood in my mouth. As an exploration of patriarchal legacies, it is an education that urges us to question the manumission of then and of now.