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Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head

Shortlisted for the 2022 Felix Dennis Prize

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Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head

By: Warsan Shire
Narrated by: Warsan Shire
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Bought to you by Penguin.

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.

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 toward womanhood. 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. These are noisy lives, full of music and weeping and surahs. These are fragrant lives, full of blood and perfume and jasmine. These are polychrome lives, full of moonlight and turmeric and kohl.

The long-awaited collection from one of our most exciting contemporary poets is a blessing, an incantatory celebration of survival. Every reader will come away changed.

© Warsan Shire 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

 Death, Grief & Loss European Family Poetry Themes & Styles World Literature

Critic reviews

I have long been a massive fan of Warsan Shire's extraordinarily gifted poetry. Her exquisite, memorable and finely-tuned poems articulate a depth of experience that never fails to surprise and profoundly move me, as she so powerfully gives voice to the unspoken (Bernardine Evaristo)
An incredible collection (Candice Carty-Williams)
Shire invokes the creative powers of the writer to transform one's past... Vital, moving and courageous, this is a debut not to be missed (Mary Jean Chan)
It is absolutely astonishing how much emotion, intelligence, imagination, and truth Warsan Shire can get into one collection. She is a poet of the highest order, with a compassionate heart, and a limitless mind (Benjamin Zephaniah)
Must-read poetry from the superstar Somali-British writer Warsan Shire
Warsan Shire... explores trauma, womanhood and migration so magnificently that even Beyoncé has quoted her
I read Warsan Shire's eagerly awaited debut poetry collection, Bless the Daughter Raised By a Voice in Her Head, greedily, in one giant gulp. It surpassed my expectations, and shortly after I turned the final page of this collection, I wanted more (Sana Goyal)
Shire's strikingly beautiful imagery leverages the specificity of her own womanhood, love life, tussles with mental health, grief, family history, and stories from the Somali diaspora, to make them reverberate universally... Enthralling... The poetry in Bless the Daughter soothes, even while it picks at the scabs of the wounds that cause trauma (Dzifa Benson)
Powerful metaphors characterise Warsan Shire's Bless the Daughter Raised By a Voice in Her Head, a book of blessings, of ecstasy through trauma, in particular the trauma of the refugee
Poetry is a sure-fire way to change your mental landscape and this long-awaited collection from the Somali-British poet/Beyoncé collaborator combines poems about war and migration with celebrations of joy (Justine Jordan)
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