A breathtaking mediation on family, war, trauma and life as a refugee. Beautiful, haunting, each poem is like a prayer, the smell of incense following you as you close the book and take a breath. One to be approached slowly, reverently; a book to live within.

What an amazing book, full of raw emotion and barely suppressed anger particularly about the plight of refugees who don't ask or want to leave their home countries but are forced out of them. I found "Home" particularly affecting.
I didn't know of Warsan Shire before I read this, and although we are very different ages and with different cultural heritage, I felt that her poems touched on universal themes of many women's lives. I particularly liked her use of somali words which sounded right in the poems, - but I was pleased of the glossary so I could understand them.
Thank you to netgalley and Random House for an advance copy of this book

A moving and electrifying collection of poetry. I have never read anything by this poet before and I found this collection to be captivating.

Thank you to Netgalley for the opportunity to read this ARC.

I tried reading these poems but they seemed badly formatted on my kindle and I couldn't access them on the NetGalley shelf. I will give the book 3 stars and I will look for this when it is published as I enjoy poetry and this collection looked interesting.

“I want to go home, but home is the mouth of a shark. Home is the barrel of a gun. No one would leave home unless home chased you to the shore.”

Punchy and powerful poetry. These poems are full of lines and themes that leave you struck into silence.

“Mother says there are locked rooms inside all women. Sometimes, the men - they come with keys, and sometimes, the men - they come with hammers.”

It’s not an easy read, but Shire has highlighted beauty in the pain. There is a particularly beautiful poem called Backwards which is beautiful when read forwards and backwards.

There is so much skill in saying so much with so little, my favourite line:

“Chain-smoking under ill-formed halos.”

Beautiful.

Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in her Head will be released on 10th March 2022. Thank you NetGalley for the arc.

I love poetry, but I just couldn't get on with this - it was well written and told a story, but i didn't find it relatable at all

This is a powerful collection of poems from Warsan Shire, an award-winning poet also known for her writing being included in Beyonce's 'Lemonade'.

Her poems are focused around areas including womanhood, faith and the concept of home, and this collection is an excellent introduction to a brilliant writer.

This is a beautiful book full of beautiful poems. Every page speaks in some way to universal themes of love, pain, family… I will reread this regularly. Each reading brings additional depth. Many of the words and phrases are unknown to me, so I look things up and I learn. That is fine with me because poetry needs to be able to challenge us and make us think.

Some excerpts will give a flavour:-

"No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of the shark."
"You only leave home when home won’t let you stay."
"No one puts their children in a boat, unless the water is safer than the land."
"At night her silk scarf slips around her neck like a noose."

Ms Shire is an accomplished and polished poet and there are many forms of poems in this collection. Each tells us of a world we are unlikely to ever visit but through this work we get a glimpse. That is a strength of the writing.

I was given a copy of this book by Netgalley

This is a powerful collection of prose-poems, filled with violence, longing, possibility. Warsan Shire has perhaps not personally experienced the violences described (she came to the UK at one year old) but "I am the sin of memory and the absence of memory" we read. And what an advocate for those without a ready voice to publish and remind us of their plights. That of the refugee "All these men between my legs, a gun, a promise, a lie, his name, his flag, his language, his manhood in my mouth." 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.". She is a great ventriloquist with the tools to conjure those voices: "The poem can start with him walking backwards into a room (...) that's how we bring Dad back. (...) I can write the poem and make it disappear (..) I'll rewrite this whole life and this time...
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. I feel that to remind us of this particularly womanly condition is particularly welcome.

A dark and gloomy collection of poetry covering some difficult topics following a journey through to womanhood.
I wish I knew there was a glossary at the end as I really did not understand all the words and phrases and my kindle didn’t recognise them or pick them up when it was highlighted. I gave up trying to Google to understand as I was losing the flow and essence of the story. I think the glossary would have been useful at the beginning. Therefore, I did not always connect and resonate with the words and I found it hard to read at times.
I really wanted to like this as the title, premise and cover looked great. The writing itself was fantastic and I’m sure many will relate and enjoy, but overall it wasn’t for me.
Thank you to NetGalley, Random House UK, Vintage AND Warsan Shire for the opportunity to read and review.

It’s taken me a while to write this review. A hugely emotive and highly skilled collection from surely one of the best living poets we have. Stories of migration, coming of age, war, violence, sexual assault, tradition, all pack a punch in this extraordinary collection of verse. There isn’t much more to say. All I know is that I’ll be thinking about it for months and months to come.

As someone who had never read more than a few of Warsan Shire’s poems, often cut up and posted in short quotable sections, I was eager to see what a cohesive collection would look like.

These poems are raw, punchy and striking, dealing with topics from war, the refugee crisis and sexual assault, among many others. The language is often brilliant and shimmering, before crashing into violent images and difficult topics, which is where this collection really soars.

The occasional poem left me wanting a bit more, but overall this collection was very strong and thought-provoking.

I received an advanced copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This book spoke to me of rites of passage and then again, some rites ripped away. Lives cut short - such sadness there
It’s a real voice of women for today and written with such feeling.

“No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark. // No one puts their children in a boat, unless the water is safer than the land.”

warsan shire never disappoints. she's able to articulate the feeling of immigrant alienation with growing up into womanhood, to the legacy we inherit from our mothers, trauma and violence. in her poetry, words can be simultaneously tender and sharp, wounding even in their gentleness.

favourite poems:
home
backwards
bless this house

arc from netgalley, thank u to the author and to the publishers for the book!

Interesting book although not one to read on a day when you are feeling a bit depressed as it certainly is not cheery. A book I will look at again when the world is in less turmoil.

This was an incredibly powerful collection of poems that beautifully described the experiences of womanhood, refugees & family. The glossary was a great touch and although at times it was hard to read due to the challenging subject matter, Warsan Shire writes with such a graceful touch that makes it feels so easy. This was a great introduction to her work for me and I cannot wait to read more!

Bless the Daughter is as powerful and evocative as you'd expect Warsan Shire to be. Her poems get right under the skin of refugee experience, with pieces about belonging, gender and love, faith and family. She does fall into repetition over the course of this full-length collection, which means some of the later poems lose impact, but there's no denying this is a very cohesive, confident book.

I started to read the first poem and was totally captivated. I didn’t realise at first that there is a glossary at the end of the book and I started to look up the meaning of certain words. However, I soon gave up doing this as I realised that I needed to immerse myself in each powerful poem without stopping. Once I finished the first reading, I went back to study each wonderful poem in more depth. I looked up the word “Hooyo”, a word that comes up so often. The first meaning I found on Google was “home”. I realised after a while that this couldn’t be the only meaning. It is in fact “mother “ but the word “home” is so relevant too in these astonishing poems by a writer who should be part of every school curriculum. We so often read about refugees but in these poems, you get into the head of the refugee who would not leave home unless “home was the mouth of a shark”. Thank you, Netgalley for allowing me to read this. I look forward to buying my own copy. The cover looks amazing too. My book group doesn’t read poetry but we will definitely read and discuss this book!

This collection of poetry by Warsan Shire is a startling one, full of insight, incredibly powerful and deeply moving. Exploring what it means to be a black woman in this world, she finds new ways to express universal truths, whilst speaking to the unique experience of one person. After reading this I will be tracking down more by her.

ARC provided through NetGalley for an honest review, thank you to them and the publishers and to Warsan Shire for a memorable collection.

Really beautiful poetry. A lot of it is repurposed from other volumes, which I wasn't expecting, but that's only a problem if you've already read Warsan Shire's full corpus. If you're a new reader, then it won't matter one whit. Warsan Shire is one of the most exciting poets writing today, and I'm so grateful to finally have a full length work from her. I couldn't pick a favourite from these. They're heartbreaking and beautiful and there are so many lines that stand out; you'd end up highlighting the whole book if you tried to pick out the most evocative.

The sole criticism I have of this one is that some of the poems were quite repetitive, using the same imagery in the same way, as though they were reworkings of the same root poem. That's not a problem if the text is structured in a way that makes use of this as a deliberate device, such as by placing both poems next to each other or using them to bookend other poems, but it seemed randomly spaced out so as to disguise these similarities rather than celebrate them, and that made the poems lose some of their resonance for me.

Still, this is one I'll be thinking about for a very long time. Many of these poems call to be read over and over again, until you can recite them off by heart. The language is rich and gorgeous. The imagery is striking in a way you can physically feel. As a collection, it could have been structured better, but every individual poem is incredible.