Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head: Poems

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About Bless The Daughter Raised By A Voice In Her

Product Description Poems of migration, womanhood, trauma, and resilience from the celebrated collaborator on Beyoncé's Lemonade and Black Is King, award-winning Somali British poet Warsan Shire. Mama, I made it/ out of your home/ alive, raised by the/ voices in my head. 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. 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. In Shire's hands, lives spring into fullness. This is noisy life: full of music and weeping and surahs and sirens and birds. This is fragrant life: full of blood and perfume and shisha smoke and jasmine and incense. This is polychrome life: full of henna and moonlight and lipstick and turmeric and kohl. The long-awaited collection from one of our most exciting contemporary poets, this book is a blessing, an incantatory celebration of resilience and survival. Each reader will come away changed. Review “With her first full-length poetry collection,  Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head, Warsan Shire electrifies. Her poems capture young Black womanhood, what it means to search for home in the world, what it means to inhabit a woman’s body, the tensions of reconciling faith and family and everything that threatens the borders of expectation and obligation. The beautifully crafted poems in this collection are fiercely tender gifts.” —Roxane Gay “Warsan Shire’s fierce and compelling book of poems should come with a warning label: These poems will break your heart. Never has the phrase ‘Speak truth to power’ been truer. But Shire does more than speak truth; she sings truth and that is precisely her power. Her poems are incantations, chants, spells for our time and all time. They address the displacements and violence experienced by migrants, refugees, those in dark bodies and in female bodies. Where else to go for safety and salve but poetry? Souls so deep that no cruelty or injustice can drown their song. A warrior woman poet, Shire wields words as weapons of mass creation. It is a ‘war’ every reader will want to fight with her. And we do, by reading and rereading her poems.” —Julia Alvarez, author of In the Time of the Butterflies and Afterlife   “Warsan Shire is an expert sculptor. She molds words into clay, her poems into statues—each one a wonder that I return to, in reverence. Because in every line, every curve is an invitation to see differently what has been deemed ugly or difficult. This book is the art gallery I’ve yearned to visit.” —Vivek Shraya, author of I’m Afraid of Men and Even This Page Is White About the Author Warsan Shire is a Somali British writer and poet. She was awarded the inaugural African Poetry Prize, served as the first Young Poet Laureate of London, is the author of two chapbooks, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth and Her Blue Body, and is the youngest ever member of the Royal Society of Literature. She provided the poetry for the Peabody Award-winning visual album Lemonade and Black Is King in collaboration with Beyoncé Knowles-Carter.