I love poetry and this collection was perfect. Each poem stood out on their own and were incredibly impactful. I hope to read more from this writer. I think seasoned poetry readers will enjoy this, but also people who would like to venture into reading more poetry.,

I really enjoyed this. I enjoyed that the poetry wasn't too explicit. That is the worst part about poetry for me sometimes. I do like the meaning and ideas to be a little bit hidden from me.

And the award for best bookcover (and poetry collection) goes to...
I absolutely loved this collection. One of the best and a new favorite.

Warson Shire's poetry was one of the main inspirations for Beyonce's groundbreaking album Lemonade. She was named the first Young Poet Laureate of London at age 25 and the youngest ever fellow in the UK Royal Society of Literature. A work of hardship and growth, Warson Shire's new book is called Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head.

Her poems cover the immigrant experience, love loss, abuse and feeling alien wherever you go.
"Love is not haram but after years of fucking women who are unable to pronounce your name you find yourself totally alone..." (Midnight in the Foreign Food Aisle). Her prose is achingly sad and strong with memory. She is able to carry and retain her identity in a forever foreign land.

Favorite poems were:
Home: "No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark."
My Father the Astronaut: "If the Moon was Europe, my father was an astronaut who died on his way to the moon."
Backwards: "I'll rewrite this whole life and this time there'll be so much love you won't be able to see beyond it."

I encourage everyone to read this moving, powerful debut collection from an Islamic-British Black woman who got some notoriety because she worked with Beyonce on her album Lemonade and with Disney on Black is King. But Beyonce and Disney aside, Warsan Shire is a fantastic poet in her own right, the first young Poet Laureate of London, and she has written an exquisitely wrenching collection.

In this, her first full-length collection, Shire reflects on how her mother failed her while making clear she knows her mother's suffering forged her into who she became. This leaves Shire able to reflect back on her mother's suffering with compassion while still wishing things had been different. She also reflects on the treatment of refugees, on child sexual abuse, on white privilege, and on the loss of her father and some dear friends.

There's a glossary in the back of the book, which is good to know before you start reading so you can look up unfamiliar (Islamic) words as you come across them in the poems. Even without the glossary, though, most things are clear from context.

Here are some lines that had a deep impact on me:

The first poem in the collection, "Extreme Girlhood," makes a reference to the book's title and is one of the best. In it, a baby girl is "the patron saint of not good enough," and Shire includes lots of American cultural references ("At first I was afraid, I was petrified... Are you there, God; it's me, the ugly one.") She then blesses herself, recalling her "scalp massaged with the milk/ of cruelty, cranium cursed/ crushed between adult knees,/ drenched in pink lotion [a product used to replace the moisture lost to heat irons].// Everything you did to me,/ I remember.// Mama, I made it out of your home/ alive, raised by the voices/ in my head."

In "Assimilation," she writes lines that slayed me: "We never unpacked, / dreaming in the wrong language, / carrying our mother's fears in our feet... unable to erase the refugee from our hearts." "At each and every checkpoint, the refugee is asked/ are you human?"

The other most powerful poem in the book, also about refugees, is "Home," which notes, "No one leaves home unless home is/ the mouth of a shark." "No one puts their children in a boat/ unless the water is safer than the land." and "The insults are easier to swallow than/ finding your child's body in the rubble."

She also refers to how refugees feel forever responsible for the family left behind, who leave "all their dreams lie(ing) at her feet." Born and raised in Nairobi, Shire now lives with her husband and two children in Los Angeles.

"House Full of Grace" both blesses and curses her mother: "Goddess of absence, Holy Mother, / Our Lady of Leaving Children/ with Strangers, Patron Saint of// the babies will raise themselves." Yet she recognizes that her mother's girlhood was "an incubation in grief."

In "Backwards," she imagines rewinding time (something I similarly did in my poem "Reversing Time.") "The poem can start with him walking/ backwards into a room./ He takes off his jacket and sits down/ for the rest of his life,/ that's how we bring Dad back. / I can make the blood run back up my nose."

In another poem in which she holds her mother responsible for her suffering, "Hooya" [Mom] Isn't Home," she writes about the child sexual abuse she endured in her mother's absence. The poem ends with, "While you wash your body you/ realize it is not your body./ And at the same time, it is the only/ body you have."

Many poems, following the book's title, are blessings: "Bless the Moon," "Bless this School for Girls." She refers multiple times to the patron saints of things. In "Bless this House," which is about women's bodies, she begins, "Mother says there are locked rooms inside all women./ Sometimes, the men -- they come with keys,/ and sometimes, the men -- they come with hammers."

Shire laments friends stricken with cancer, her dead father, a tortured child killed by her caretakers in London, whom she hopes is "rewarded with 72 devoted mothers who delicately dry her small body with wool softer than skin," a reference to the 72 virgins supposedly righteous Islamic men are promised.

In ":Grief Has Its Blue Hands in My Hair," she confesses to using sex to escape grief's pain: "Grief sedated by orgasm,/ orgasm heightened by grief" but laments her mother's "war-mottled future."

And finally, in a triumphantly positive poem, "Bless Grace Jones," she names Jones, :Holy Mother of those deemed intimidating,/ patron saint of the unapproachable,/ savior of those told to soften their expression... From you," she writes, "we are learning to put ourselves first."

Amen.

I had the pleasure of hearing excerpts as performed live by the author and ‘Home’ remains a firm favourite.

I was drawn to this work after being bowled over by Shire's earlier book, "Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth." In BLESS THE DAUGHTER RAISED BY A VOICE IN HER HEAD, Shire's dexterous wielding of the English language is just as gripping as it was in her debut. I read this collection slowly, then revisited its poems again once I held a physical copy in my hands. There is no way to describe the ineluctable power a truly gifted poet has without, I suspect, being a poet oneself. But suffice it to say, Shire's voice reverberates deeply, and will continue to. Highly recommend picking this and/or her previous work up if you're participating in the Sealey Challenge this August!

A collection in a few distinct movements, but a couple of which are considerably stronger than others. More often than not is on the right side of that balance though, and still above average in its weaker moments. Absolutely devastating in its best moments, riding a wave of anger and calibrated cynicism to powerful and moving ends.

I think I read this too soon after Shire's chapbook Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth. Many of the poems were excerpted or reformatted from the chapbook, but in ways that seemed to lessen their impact. While still beautifully done, this collection didn't feel as powerful overall.
Favorite poems: Assimilation, Midnight in the Foreign Food Aisle

I received an eARC from the publisher

I received this book as an ARC from NetGalley.

Although Warsan Shire's poems powerfully express her feelings about multiple themes, the style is not to my liking. Each reader must decide for themselves about the literary style that moves them.

A stunning book of poetry about womanhood, survival and resilience by the Somali British poet, who is known for collaborating on Beyoncé’s visual album ‘Lemonade’ and her film ‘Black is King.’
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​Exploring the experiences of immigrants and refugees, mothers and daughters, and being a young Black woman, Shire weaves a story of a young woman transitioning, mostly on her own, into adulthood.

Just from the title I knew I'd want to read this collection. Every line is gorgeous. Powerfully details culture, womanhood, trauma. I loved every piece. I couldn't agree more with the last line of the description, "Each reader will come away changed."

Acclaimed Somali-British writer and poet, Warsan Shire, was born in Nairobi and raised in London. In her much anticipated first full-length poetry collection, she covers difficult aspects of girlhood, growing into a woman’s body and womanhood, with empathy and compassion.

This collection, says Shire, is for all those who had to raise themselves, who had to raise their younger siblings, and who also found an inner world as a way to escape their circumstances

Warsan is a voice for the voiceless. Her parents fled Somali just before the war broke out and the family moved to England as refugees, so she has firsthand knowledge of family and friends escaping Africa to become immigrants in far away countries. She writes beautifully about loss and displacement. The “refugee” poems in her collection are among the most heartbreaking.

Assimilation

We never unpacked,
dreaming in the wrong language,
carrying our mother’s fears in our feet—
if he raises his voice we will flee
if he looks bored we will pack our bags
unable to excise the refugee from our hearts,
unable to sleep through the night

The refugee’s heart has six chambers.
In the first is your mother’s unpacked suitcase.
In the second, your father crying into his hands.
The third room is an immigration office,
your severed legs in the fourth,
in the fifth a uterus— yours?
The sixth opens with the right papers

I can’t get the refugee out of my body,
I bolt my body whenever I get the chance.
How many pills does it take to fall asleep?
How many to meet the dead?

The refugee’s heart often grows
an outer layer. An assimilation.
It cocoons the organ. Those unable to grow the extra skin
die within the first sixth months in a host country.

The refugee is sure it’s still human but worries that overnight,
while it slept, there may have been a change in classification.

A huge thank you to @netgalley and @randomhouse.

Bless The Daughter Raised by the Voice in Her Head by Warsan Shire. Thanks to Net Galley @netgalley for letting me read a digital ARC of this evocative new poetry collection.
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"no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well"
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Bless this Daughter is Warsan Shire's first full-length collection. Like a lot of Beyoncé fans, I was introduced to Warsan Shire's work through the visual album for Lemonade and immediately wanted to read more of her work. This gut-punch of a new collection focuses on Black womanhood, resilience, and migration.
As someone who doesn't not read that much poetry the test for me is if at the end of a poem I want to immediately turn back to the beginning and start again - snaking my eyes back through the poem to better understand its structure, its rhythm, its message. This collection passed that test with flying colours - I am hard pressed to choose a favourite poem, but tempted to flip the book over and start back at the beginning, study, understand.
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#warsanshire #blessthedaughterraisedbyavoiceinherhead #poetry #reading2022 #readmorepoetry #recommendedread #bookpost #poetry2022 #netgalley

What a gorgeous collection of poems. I am typically not a big reader of poetry but these really work for me. What a gorgeous way with words Shire has. Truly a gift with poetry.
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Thank you #randomhouse and #NetGalley for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

Great collection of poems that really resonated. It really captured the emotions of being a refugee in.a lovely, easy to connect with way.

5 stars

Warsan Shire is a wonderful poet. I first came across her writing in college during a poetry class on War & Protest. This collection is a mix of poems on identity, refugees and escaping war, trauma, becoming a woman, and the pain of family getting older. It is a striking collection full of grit and raw honesty. It is fueled by the hunger to be honest about Warsan's experiences and her musings on events of racism, war, and tragedy. One of the best poetry collections I've read recently in terms of the wide variety of intense topics. I rarely read poetry on war anymore, but it seems very fitting considering what is transpiring in Ukraine and other countries who are fleeing from war. I can't recommend this collection enough.

Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head by Warsan Shire is a collection that pushes readers to their limits with her beautiful, tragic poems. Their dark beauty with their sometimes violent images reach inside us, pull out our hearts, and ring them until there is little left but open love and empathy.

Book review: Poet reflects on race, gender, trauma in stunning collection
By ASHLEY RIGGLESON FOR THE FREE LANCE–STAR Mar 26, 2022
In the past, I have not read a lot of poetry, but this year I have been getting into the genre. I recently have read three poetry collections, and Warsan Shire’s début full-length collection, “Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in her Head” was a stunner.

Though this is Shire’s début, she has made a name for herself in other projects, and she has even collaborated with Beyoncé. With such big credits to her name, I was not sure what to expect from this collection. Though I love reading poetry, I do not always understand it. But Shire’s poetry is remarkably unpretentious. Make no mistake, she is interested in big themes and ideas. She talks about trauma (and, in particular, trauma to women’s bodies), the refugee experience, war and her identity as a Somali British writer.

She writes with poignancy about her struggle for belonging and about inhospitable countries. In her new home, she faces racism and reflects, “The insults are easier to swallow than finding your child’s body in the rubble.” She would like to go home she says, “but home is the mouth of a shark.”

Though she is clearly concerned with race, Shire also writes a great deal about gender. In her poem “Extreme Girlhood,” which opens the collection, she writes, “Bless the baby girl, caul of dissatisfaction, patron saint of not good enough,” and begins an important conversation about what it is like to grow up as a daughter in a culture where daughters are not valued. And as the collection progresses, Shire goes deeper into that theme, showing readers the way that being a woman in this society manifests as trauma or illness in the body.

While Shire is clearly grappling with some big ideas, her language is surprisingly simple, and the poems are quite short. Though there are few wordy flourishes here, all the words are necessary. And there was not a single bad poem in this collection.

Shire’s writing pierced my heart on every page. I was by turns angry and devastated, and though some readers are sure to be put off by what was on many ways a challenging read, Shire writes with an urgency and immediacy I admire. She gives voice to those who are usually silenced and for that, I salute her..

This review was originally printed in the Free Lance-Star in Fredericksburg, VA

It's always hard to rate a collection of poetry but in this instance I have no problem at all - it clearly is a five star book. As a Somali British poet, Warsan Shire draws from her own life to present us with the realities of a young black girl's life and identity. Her words truly punch you in the gut. Some themes that jumped out were women's bodies, faith, sexuality, trauma, family, motherhood.... I could go on. A beautiful collection that everyone should read.