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

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I have loved Shire's work throughout my 20s and now as I have entered my 30s, I feel so completely blown away by how timeless she has made herself.

It feels weird that Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head is Warsan Shire's first full-length poetry collection.You think you don't recognize the poet's name but most of the words in Beyonce's Lemonade were penned by Warsan Shire.

Dangers are everywhere, such as in a traffic stop where young people are compared to ‘ an animal standing on hind legs / pretending to understand why it must die. Tradurre la poesia è un compito molto arduo, non lo voglio mettere in dubbio, ma non credo in questo caso si renda giustizia ai testi originali. I thought that the increase in sophistication of the poems made some of them too cryptic and it took out the impact the 1st collection had on me. This to say that I thought some of these poems were striking and memorable (particularly the one on Victoria Climbie), whereas others - whilst including some great imagery and writing - didn't leave much of an impression.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. 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. In the poem, Jones gets blown up with titles such as “patron saint of the unapproachable,” creating a stark step away from the feeling of previous poems — one that creates an underwhelming close to the collection. Bless the Daughter is published in a gorgeous hardback edition with the most beautiful end papers that I have ever seen – the folks over at Penguin Random House sure know how I love a good bright HOT PINK!

Obviously, you want your work to be used in any way to raise funds for all suffering people, but I want people to know who I wrote that about. 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. Whilst not all the poems are equal, the whole collection is absolutely compelling in its fearlessness to explore with evocative, direct language and a striking rhythm, the depth of the extra violence suffered by these women in their bodies and identity.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. Her poems have been published in Wasafiri, Magma and Poetry Review and in the anthology 'The Salt Book of Younger Poets' (Salt, 2011).