I got a free e-copy of "bone" by Yrsa Daley-Wars on @netgalley in exchange for a honest review! I'm still struggling to find a proper way to judge modern poetry: in absence of a proper metric structure, I feel like most of my judgement depends on the reactions that a specific poem has on me, but at the same time I feel like that isn't impartial at all... anyway, these poems were all very powerful indeed: I didn't "click" with all of them, but I definitely appreciated the voice of the author and there were a few poems that stuck with me - such as the one in the picture! Overall, I really enjoyed it, although I feel it will take more time to determine if the contents are going to stay with me or not. 3.5/5🌟

I’ve been trying to read more poetry, both contemporary and classical. I have a whole shelf of it at home, but it’s rare that I ever actually take a book down and read any of it. But I write a lot of the stuff myself and reading is by far the best way to improve so… 

Yrsa Daley-Ward’s collection intrigued me. She balances neatly between the confessional style so popular on the internet, and more classic, perhaps more academic poetry. She writes about a lot of things, but mostly about love. Healthy relationships, obsessive relationships, abusive relationships, hopeful relationships, dead relationships, queer relationships… they’re all there, and the thread that runs through the whole book is that of a tortured, yet joyous relationship with love itself. 

Daley-Ward is a Black British writer, and her background is always present as an undercurrent, making the poems even more hard-hitting. There are a few prose pieces, short stories really, about such things as what it’s like to be gay and a member of a conservative religion, or the loss of a parent. There are a lot of difficult topics in here, but she manages them with tenderness and eloquence. 

The poetry itself is probably still a little bit too confessional for my taste – I have to admit I prefer things a little less raw, perhaps? But I have read that Daley-Ward is a spoken word poet so I’m very interested to see how the poems work as performance pieces. Often the way in which a poem is performed changes it completely, and it’s difficult to translate that across to written work. Still, there are a lot of beautiful pieces, and I really enjoyed reading Bone.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

*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.

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

“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.

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.

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.

It's been a while since I've cried reading a poetry book and Bone brought me to tears so many times. All other collections will fall short when compared to Bone. 

Yrsa Daley-Ward is the poet this generation has been searching for.

Bone by Yrsa Daley-Ward. 

I received a copy of this from the publishers via Netgalley.

Daley-Ward is a poet, actor and model born to a Jamaican mother and a Nigerian father. She was raised by her grandparents in Chorley in the North of England. Bone is an amazing book of poetry that I devoured in an hour. This is poetry that I just ‘got.’ Daley-Ward does not use flowery language or long flowing sentences. This is poetry that goes back to the bare ‘bones’ of language and emotion.

The poetry tells of Daley-Ward’s life. Her history, identity, mental health. Her relationships with men, women, family and also religion. All of her poetry spoke to me on some level but I found her poems on metal health and also the loss of relationships particularly moving. Nose is a poem which I am so grateful to have discovered:

all the Mornings in Lancashire still smell like you.

Last week I was caught in a storm overseas.

When the rain smell drove me silly

all I could feel were your hands.
Her poems are about the senses. I love the language she uses – its simplicity is so evocative and honest.  I feel I can taste, smell, touch what she means. This is not pretentious poetry. It is not full of metaphor. You don’t spend hours trying to understand what she means. The understanding is immediate and I think that is what makes it so accessible:

If I’m entirely honest,

and you say I much be

I want to stay with you all afternoon evening, night and tomorrow

pressed into you so tightly that we don’t know whose belly made what sound whose heart it is

that is thumping like that

until I don’t know if the sweat on my chest is yours or mine.
I was initially quite surprised that on Netgalley Bone is marketed as Young Adult. Having said that, I think the immediacy of text and subject matter would really really speak to adolescents.

Brilliant read and one I would thoroughly recommend.

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.

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.

*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.

Several extracts from the poems of Yrsa Daley-Ward’s collection Bone have ended up in my diary and on the walls of my room. The collection is as raw and essential as the title suggests: no sentence is unnecessary; every line is charged. Whole poems are made up of sentences which could be considered aphorisms, but which lack their sarcasm or arrogance.

Yrsa Daley-Ward, born from Jamaican and Nigerian parents and raised in the north of England, hides nothing of herself and her story, and puts her hands in all the dark, visceral, and secret places of her life. She writes uncompromisingly about the most difficult themes: mental illness, sexual work and abuse, poverty, depression and hope, family, home, and love – especially love.

Although Bone is made up of many poems and several pieces of flash-fiction, the collection gave me the feeling of being more unitary, complete, and solid than its form may suggest; it almost felt like a novel, or a movie. Recurring images or themes set the mood and atmosphere of the whole collection, so that after a couple of pages the poems begin to feel familiar. For instance, a recurring image is that of small spaces, dark spaces, tight spaces, things which fold on themselves, which gasp for air, which need to escape.

But this is not everything. As much as the poems have a claustrophobic undertone, they are not dwelling into it or into drama for its own sake, and are ready to embrace the complexity of emotions and the most luminous parts of existence as well–again, especially love. The poems in which this was most manifest were my favorite ones. One of them is “not the end of the world, but almost,” with extracts like:



    No hard feelings hard, bright world

but maybe

just maybe you are not for me. Maybe

I’m stretched too thinly, pressed too deeply into you in a shape that I

can’t keep without cramping and maybe

just maybe your breath is too cold. …

That was when I saw you.

…

Days when I want to kiss you but

your mouth is bitter and my thoughts

are bitter and I’m angry, just mad, just crazy with it all

but we are each others home sweet

home, Love.

The roof is screwed on too tight at

times and the walls of our house can pinch a little but, my God, they are

always warm.



The collection is ultimately saved from being dark and obsessive. The poems are also full of light, and of strength, and of warmth. Sometimes, they are touching. It is also true, however, that they are not always easy to relate to, and that the repetitiveness of certain themes and moods might be heavy on people who have no idea whatsoever what the author is talking about. For this reason, although I would say that this book is for many, it is not for all.

Delicate and raw at once.