maya ☆'s Reviews > Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head

warsan shire immediately ambushed me with a knife to my throat, drew my blood, and laid down all the woes and the pains in such ravishing, rightfully bitter and poignant prose, i can only stand there, like an idiot, totally disarmed and bewitched. there is simultaneously a violence and a beauty in this collection of poems - which i understand, is her first! - that is rarely found elsewhere...


"no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark. you only run for the border when you see the whole city running as well. the boy you went to school with, who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory, is holding a gun bigger than his body. 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. no one would choose days and nights in the stomach of a truck, unless the miles traveled meant something more than journey

no one would choose to crawl under fences, beaten until you shadow leaves, raped, forced off the boat because you are darker, drowned, sold, starved, shot at the border like a sick animal, pitied. no one would choose to make a refugee camp home for a year or two or ten, stripped and searched, finding prison everywhere"


you'd open a page and you would see the work speaks for it self. there is hardly any other collection cleverer, more torturous and more gorgeous than shire's collection of poems. she writes candidly about the traumatizing life experience of being black, being a black woman, being a black woman of muslim faith, being a black woman who's a refugee - to be othered and in search of home again, forced to seek... anything to hold on to in diasporas. this poem collection stings you and then makes your body ache. warsan shire's talent is immeasurable. her agony reverberates long after you've read it, it's as if you were personally scorned. her poems take you from personal to intergenerational traumas, from almost-savage girlhood to grievous womanhood, while all being super precise and relating to her own experience. as a black woman, i must profess - this is phenomenal.


"we found something crouching behind your bed, it grunted when approached, sang a severed song, a dead thing clinging to life, a mass of knots, born of fiber, torn from blood vessels, dry to the touch.

when it stood, it was the height of a shrill scream, we asked its name, it said your name.

in the garden we set fire to it, it burnt quickly, made a neonatal sound, left behind the perfume of scorched sulfur. was it yours?"


one said that the way warsan shire writes the same way nina simone sang. i cannot agree more. she captures the suffering like i have yet to see elsewhere. this collection is raging, hadean and a magnetic piece - an excellent knock-out blow for prose.

a visceral, living thing.