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

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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. If you're familiar with Shire's previous work, this collection of poems feels familiar, even with the recent additions. I still think it a wonderful and heart-breaking collection of poetry about womanhood, refugee’s life, displacement, identity, war, love and death.

There were many African terms that I did not know and I missed the meaning of some poems because of that.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. Non metto punteggio pieno perché ho dei dubbi sulle traduzioni, che mi sembrano poco centrate e, in alcuni casi, superficiali.

Children’ are ‘distant galaxies’ while father ‘hang[s] on the edge of the moon’, as unreachable as innocence lost. In this second poem, Shire implements spiritual and elegant language which disconnects the poem from the disturbing events actually being described. 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. or the traumatised immigrant "She listens to the clamoring voices, oh how blessed she is, how proud they are, how all their hopes depend on her, how walahi, all their dreams lie at her feet. 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.

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 and the lives of loved ones, 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. 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. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.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. Only then does Shire provide her readers with several jarring accounts of violence, evoking more visceral reactions. I also love how some known poems are brought in, but are given a new life and a new meaning in the context of the whole collection, a whole girlhood.