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

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Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head tackles many of the same themes as her previous work, with the same striking verse we’ve come to expect from her. The ache of these emotions creates the perfect entry into what will become a searing pain as Shire’s writing continues. This creates an irreconcilable difference between the language implemented and the content being referred to within the poem. 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. 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.

But included are some high voltage descriptions inspired by rape and immigration experience that have the power to remain. Like, Miss Shire really said it's fun for the whole family because after reading Lullaby For Father, I picked up the phone to contact my dad so he could hear it and maybe even cry for himself too. When I am cornered this one comes 'An animal standing on hind legs pretending to understand why it must die'. 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.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. All the brilliance of her lean, monumental Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth is magnified in this remarkable new book. Conversely, in “Victoria in Illiyin,” she embodies the voice of the community who has lost “our Victoria. In “Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head,” Shire boldly weaves together a narrative of what it means to be displaced, disconnected from home, and incredibly vulnerable. In absolute awe of this mastery of language, poetry like this pulls your heart in a very dreamy way.

Her poems have been published in Wasafiri, Magma and Poetry Review and in the anthology 'The Salt Book of Younger Poets' (Salt, 2011). which weaves together the themes of migration, womanhood, Black identity, and intergenerational collection that Shire is so singularly gifted at exploring. 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.Shire identifies the different ways in which the book may be read, commenting directly on the predicted experiences of her readers.

She does so through vignettes of her own family and community members in a way that blurs the boundary between blood relations and a greater cultural history. Regarding the physical structure of the poems themselves, Shire doesn’t use forms that could further the feelings she’s attempting to disseminate through her poems’ content. As I usually do with poems, I read them aloud to get a sense of the rhythms of the words and sought out a few online readings by Warsan Shire including ‘Home’ that in heartbreaking visceral images chronicles the experience of the refugee. Some of the new poems were interesting but they all seemed like mirrors and weaker versions of Shire's old poetry.The collection truly ends with the poem “Nail Technician as a Palm Reader,” closing with the image of a daughter “blossoming / out of a hole in my face. 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. If that doesn't work, there may be a network issue, and you can use our self test page to see what's preventing the page from loading.