![]() But it is also a good indicator of why Shire’s work resonates so much with young women, as it did with Beyoncé, regardless of their race or nation. Still, the first poem of the collection, “Extreme Girlhood” – in which gender inequality, body dysmorphia and being born a black girl combine in a looping “prelude to suffering” – would seem to fit that confessional label. ![]() The collection’s conflicted poems about motherhood (Shire herself is a mother-of-two) might be read as confessional poetry, though Shire has insisted that “most of my work is not about me”. In “Bless the Ghost II”, it is a “shroud circling her skull” that “lathers her back in the shower,/ sometimes embracing her/ from behind, weighing/ down her shoulders”. For many female refugees who have tried to assimilate in the West, these poems suggest, war is a perpetual condition that never leaves the body. Born in Kenya in 1988 to Somali parents who fled the civil war in their country, Shire came to London when she was one year old. And now comes the 33-year-old’s long-awaited – it has been promised since 2016 – book-length debut, Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head.Īs in her two earlier pamphlets, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth and Her Blue Body, here Shire channels the voices of those who have been forced to migrate. ![]() ![]() ![]() London’s first Young Poet Laureate, Warsan Shire was catapulted into the spotlight when her poetry was used in the film of Beyoncé’s 2016 “visual album”, Lemonade. ![]()
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