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

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The commanding debut from Shire captures the loneliness of migration in crystalline language punctuated by the menace of patriarchal violence. With her first full-length poetry collection, Warsan Shire introduces us to a girl who, in the absence of a nurturing guide, makes her own stumbling way towards womanhood. While she does provide a glossary for the terms, having to jump back and forth while actively reading can generate a disconnect for certain readers.

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 . She asks so many questions that I ask myself all the time: especially when I think of loved ones lost, community members lost, the joys and pain of being a girl, a woman, a girl learning from a woman and then a woman of your own. Shire addresses the agency over one’s own body in multiple ways throughout the collection, from skin and voice marking one as an Other, to the gaze of men in a patriarchal society. She is a great ventriloquist with the tools to conjure those voices: "The poem can start with him walking backwards into a room (. There is a deep shared knowing between the speaker and the women in her life that makes possible escape, even if escape is only in the mind, even if escape cannot reprieve the vulnerability of compounded collective traumas.

The assonance of ‘veil’ and ‘il’ (the evil eye in Somali culture) is no coincidence, this is a demonstration of Shire’s technical agility that renders the narrative of this assemblage alive across all four sections. 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. Conversely, in “Victoria in Illiyin,” she embodies the voice of the community who has lost “our Victoria. You think you don't recognize the poet's name but most of the words in Beyonce's Lemonade were penned by Warsan Shire. The influential and reworked poem ‘HOME’ lays bare the fallacy and social predicament of refugees; do they enter the western world to freedom?

There is pain, regret and anger in the gentle, wistful tone, as ‘dreams [are] macerated under grief’s gaze.Perhaps she did so out of respect for Victoria herself, wanting to honor her after her death outside of the lens of her murder, but part of understanding and respecting her story could be found in acknowledging the deep injustice that occurred. When I am cornered this one comes 'An animal standing on hind legs pretending to understand why it must die'. Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head is a poetry collection about girlhood, womanhood, grief, trauma, immigration, family.

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. Perhaps Shire is providing her reader with a visceral image of the continuous nature of intergenerational trauma, but at its culmination, the collection continues to lack a narrative which can carry its reader through these deeply harrowing stories. With her first full-length poetry collection, Warsan Shire introduces us to a young girl, who, in the absence of a nurturing guide, makes her own stumbling way towards womanhood. With her first full-length poetry collection, Warsan Shire introduces us to a young girl, who, in the absence of a nurturing guide, makes her own way toward womanhood. 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.Drawing from her own life, as well as pop culture and news headlines, Shire finds vivid, unique details in the experiences of refugees and immigrants, mothers and daughters, Black women and teenage girls. Throughout the poems, Shire uses Somali words when referencing traditional familial, cultural, and religious subjects.

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. Positioning one above the other, Shire connects the sentiments of “I was an ugly child” to the sorrowful tale of when a mother “left the house and took her shoes. Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head is her 2nd collection that I have read by the author.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. While Shire’s presentation of powerful narratives can draw a deep reaction from readers, her straightforward structure and often disconnected tone makes the collection feel incomplete.