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bone

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Member Reviews

This collection made me cry, it is so movingly written, emotive, and heartfelt. It is a collection that you will want to read and re-read over and over. Yrsa Daley-Bone's writing makes you feel like you have experienced what she has.

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This poetry collection by Yrsa Daley-Ward is striking. It covers a wide range of topics, from abuse to love to exclusion and more, all of which draw on the author’s own experiences. It made me gasp, cringe, and feel sadness and hope, and pulled my awareness to so many situations I had not previously thought about.

“You will come away bruised.
You will come away bruised
but this will give you poetry.”

When I started this collection, I was unsure I could go on. It is brutal. However, it is brutal in such an amazing and raw way that it pulls you in. It is beautiful. There is such a feeling of honesty and openness, and you can feel the pain and personal realisations that Daley-Ward has poured into each poem. I think that it is probably not the best collection to read if you are new to reading poetry but definitely one to keep in mind for when you feel more comfortable. It is an emotional experience but do not be scared off: it is stunning.

I gave it 4/5 stars

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Yrsa Daley-Ward is a writer and poet of mixed West Indian and West African heritage, of which Bone is her first collection of poetry and prose. The poetry within this anthology is extremely raw and speaks about varying important issues ranging from religion, rape/sexual assault, racism, oppression and mental health to name a few. It's beautiful and extremely heartbreaking in places. It has a clear and direct route throughout the whole text and doesn't worry about the bruising. Even though a lot of them I couldn't relate to they still left me extremely emotionally - something quite telling of Wards abilities as a writer. I really recommend this to people that enjoy Warsan Shire as I feel they have the same brutality and lack of softness in their writing. I hope to read more from her if/when she publishes any more works.

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Really wonderful, honest and relateable. Beautiful work, very accessible and enjoyable.

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Book Review
Title: Bone
Author: Yrsa Daley-Ward
Genre: Poetry
Rating: *****
Review: As this is a poetry collection this review isn’t going to be as long as my novel reviews. For some of the poems I have read leading up to the ¼ mark in the collection, Bone is about how we see the world, how we see others, how others see us and how we love, good and bad. So far my favourite poems are Bone because it looks at how women look at sex and how it can make us feel in good or bad situations but you could also see it as the life of a woman of the night, Battle because at only four lines long it manages to say so much about body images and what it can be like to live with and love someone who thinks very poorly of themselves and Girls because it looks at primarily teenage girls but can apply to women of any age and how girls can be pressured by their peers into situations they don’t wont to be in and when they refuse how they can turn on one another.
Approaching the halfway mark in the collection I particularly connected to Panacea and Mental Health as these poems respectively give and insiders and outsiders view on living with someone who has a mental health condition. In Panacea it is about one half of a couple who has depression and they try to alleviate it by making love which doesn’t work, never work and in mental health it is about an outsider trying to provide comfort and support to people who are suicidal and they really resonated with me. Issue and Q are also poems I enjoyed as they look at things that wouldn’t normally cross your mind. Issue looks at the statement we choose partners who are similar to our parents and the person can’t find a partner with the right balance of both their mother and father and it does give off a strange incestuous vibe without even mentioning incest. Q on the other hand poses a question, if you could only marry yourself could you stay with yourself and the honest answer for me would be no. Another Tuesday looks at the length some people will go to in order to satisfy their own desires and wants and using other people to meet your goals doesn’t seem like a bad thing until you look back on it and wonder how you have fallen so far. Another poem that had merit was what love isn’t as it completely dismantles all the illusion around love and tells us what love isn’t rather than what it is.
As we cross into the second half of the novel Sabbath immediately jumped out to me because all the poems centring on women so far have been negative perceptions, but this poem looks at how women can use their charms to rule the known world if they wanted to. It literally gave all womankind a sense of power that some women will never feel, just reading it I felt prouder to be a woman. However, some kind of man was my favourite poem in this section as it looks at the male and female gender stereotypes and what happens when someone crosses between the genders, but it focuses on one wife’s journey to understand why her husband dresses as a woman. While she thinks on this a lot, as this is one of the longest poems in the collection, she never understands or accepts that this who Benny is, and she should be happy for him. With new genders in the modern age, it is still surprising how archaic some of the ideals are that people cling to today.
As we cross into the final section of the collection, I really liked New because it looks at how two seemingly very different people can work so well together when they complement each other’s strengths without highlighting their weaknesses. Mum is also an amazing poem because it resonated so strongly with me and some of the themes highlighted mirror that of my own family and it honestly reduced me to tears reading this one. Inconvenience was another poem that I enjoyed as it looks at how love can completely blind us to everything negative in a relationship and how we put up with some terrible things before we are willing to admit defeat to one another.
Overall, my favourite poem was mum as the relationship between a mother and her children is eternal no matter how bad things get but the way this collection looks at relationships and women in generally is eye opening, breath taking and everything in between. Highly recommended.

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Typically, I really enjoy poetry. I love the way that prose is written and the meaning that comes through thanks to various literary devices. However, this collection just wasn't for me. none of the poems screamed to me and the various topics discussed, though clearly intended to be powerful, weren't always noticeable. I was incredibly disappointed with this book.

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*I received this ARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review*

My god this was intense. And beautiful. And incredibly well written.

I did at times get confused about who the voice of the poem was and how some of the poems related to others.

But overall, this was water and fire and blood and ice and it was incredibly powerful.

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I read it in one sitting, and it's so good. There're so many good values inside. You need to check this one out though cz I enjoyed reading it very much

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“plus there is that feeling you get when you catch up with yourself.”

Okay not entirely sure what to make of this but can I just say I’m honoured to have read this so earlier on. It is a work of poetry that needs to be read (and not many live up to that standard) .

I liked how most of it was simple, there was depth, it was raw and it was the truth. But I have to say a few of the longer poems were quite strange, it was telling a story that I lost track of but when they were read I swiftly moved on to the highlights of this collection.

I read this collection within two days as it was hard to put down and the prose was very lyrical. Maybe it was the format that I read it, which influenced my experience but bone might not have lived up the hype surrounding. I expected some think more. Don’t get me wrong someone it is powerful but not exactly the wow factor.


Poetry is so important. Thank you to Netgalley for providing me a copy for an honest review.

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Thank you so much for allowing me to review Bone by Yrsa Daley-Ward! I really enjoyed this title and reviewed it on my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54ytvugmBio&t
This book has also featured in a Haul video and may feature in future videos.

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I was quite excited when I was approved for this because I had been hearing a lot of great things about it from blogger friends who had read and loved it but as much as I enjoyed some of the poems, I was overall disappointed.

This is a powerful collection, the themes are hard and raw and some of the poems hit me so hard,  they left me gasping for air. But I found that the short ones are the ones who had the most effect, the really long ones -over one page- made me lose interest once they dragged and I ended up skimming many of them because I lost focus, which I think is more a “me” problem since I don’t think other people had that problem.

And that wasn’t helped by the line breaks, some ended on weak words, some disturbed the flow of the poem and some just didn’t make sense to me. I feel like a lot of these poems I would’ve like a lot better if the breaks were better situated. I know that because all the poems I loved had good line breaks, on powerful words that just strike a cord in me. They made me emotional, they made me think and reflect on a lot of things. Some I even could relate to which is always a nice plus.

So overall, this is a collection I would recommend because it deals with important issues and I believe that there’s a poem for everyone in there.

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ARC provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review

It is refreshing to see modern poetry that isn't just following the fashion of the author pressing return after every word, but instead is crafted with each word carefully chosen. Yrsa Daley-Ward tackles the themes of sex, death, the unlikeliness of romantic love and the conflict of being gay in secular religion in a way that cuts deep and makes you think. Not every poem resonated with me but even those that did not still gave me much to mull over. A raw, visceral and confronting collection.

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Deep and intense, a prayer to the female struggles. "You are one of life's anomalies and this is how I fell." A feeling that is as transparent as a naked body and even more poetic than Milk and Honey for an instance that translates this strange reality of different time zones and solo lovers. Spoiled, melted in each other arms and memories.

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*I RECEIVED A COPY OF THIS FROM THE PUBLISHERS VIA NETGALLEY* I managed to read this in about an hour and it was full of hurt and pain. bone is a poetry and prose collection that tells the tale of the authors life, from the faith that was pushed onto her, to the horrors of what some men did to her. It made me feel angry for the life she had to endure while being so young, but it felt good to know that she was okay, that she now, is okay. Overall while I didn't connect with the poetry personally I did find it very hard hitting and important.

TRIGGER WARNINGS; mentions of rape, extremeist religion, racial abuse.

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Delicate and raw at once.

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(Nearly 3.5) This debut collection from a Black British (Nigerian/Jamaican) performance poet reminded me most of Kate Tempest’s work. Some recurring themes are growing up in a fractured family, the highs versus occasional anguish of romantic love, and the complications of being gay in the context of conservative religion. I particularly liked “Coordinates” (“Every time I travel / I meet myself a little more / Sometimes you have to leave all your cities to fall in love”), “Poetry” (“You will come away bruised but this will give you poetry”) and the gently erotic “Panacea” and “Artichokes.” A prose story about a father’s funeral is another stand-out.

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A heartbreaking, painful, hopeful, gorgeously written poetry book with pieces that were so sad and with the capacity to make you feel a range of emotions. It made me feel things with such rawness and even though I wasn't completely invested in all the poems, I was invested in the entire story Yrsa Daley-Ward was telling and I was hoping for so many good things. It's the definition of a clear, direct and hard to read story but that is so needed to understand what she was trying to say and convey here. It was devastating but at the same time it was so brilliantly constructed in a way that took you through an entire journey that was so difficult to follow. I was so engaged in hearing this story and the language was simple but used in such a way that created pieces of work that shined and came alive. It talked about sex, death, abuse, relationships, identity -blending her West Indian (Jamaican) and West African (Nigerian) cultures with her writing- and mental illnesses. I recommend it if you want to read good poetry but be aware of the trigger warnings since it's very raw, like I said.

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I'm still shaken from this experience. What a beautiful book, sparse in words, abundant in meaning.

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I quite liked this - it was powerful, and moving. Though not all the poems resonated, there was a lot in there that just hit me.

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"You make me feel like myself again. Myself before I had any solid reason to be anything else."

Bone was beautifully written, the author has a talent in story telling. I didn't connect with all the poems but for some, I cried. It was so deep and tackled issues that we're so significant in our society.

Bone will be released this September 26th, 2017 by Andrews McMeel Publishing (first published June 16th, 2014). A copy was provided by the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

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