It's always hard to rate a collection of poetry but in this instance I have no problem at all - it clearly is a five star book. As a Somali British poet, Warsan Shire draws from her own life to present us with the realities of a young black girl's life and identity. Her words truly punch you in the gut. Some themes that jumped out were women's bodies, faith, sexuality, trauma, family, motherhood.... I could go on. A beautiful collection that everyone should read.

Warsan Shire's collection Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head really knocks the wind out of you. It's difficult, honest, and beautiful in equal parts. Shire's voice shines with enviable and fierce self-assuredness while sharing deeply emotional experiences. There is something in the way she crafts these pieces that feels so intimate, you'd swear she had leaned in to tell a secret just for you. It's a pleasure to feel that way, but her strong voice rightfully commands to be heard.

This was a beautiful collection of poems. I liked how some of the poems were inspired by people or news while others were autobiographical.

Warsan Shire incinerates with her first full-length poetry collection, Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head. Her poetry depicts young black femininity, what it takes to seek for home and in society, what it takes to occupy a woman’s body, the strains of balancing religion and home, and all that breaches the bounds of expectation and responsibility. This collection's finely constructed poetry is a passionately emotional gift. Everybody must read this excellent book of poetry. While gently crafted, each phrase is a shot to the heart that nevertheless manages to be absolutely worth it. So many essential subjects in just such a tiny amount of pages: immigration, marriage, femininity. I wish it was ten times as long. Bless This House and Backwards struck me the hardest on first reading, but I felt every piece was powerful, and I'm sure another will touch with me much more when I revisit and the words have ripened longer.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an electronic copy to read in exchange for an honest review.

Wow. Just wow. This is an incredible collection of poems. Each piece evokes vivid pictures and scenarios. Warsan Shire has a compelling voice and is able to use it to create hauntingly beautiful images. There is a glossary included which is helpful for those of us whom are not familiar with Somali culture and religion. This collection will stay with me for a long time.

I enjoyed this collection of poetry. However I only gave it 3 stars because so much of it was written in a different language and the glossary was hidden in the back. It should have been in the front so that readers were aware that there were going to be words in other languages. Also this work of poetry should have come with trigger warnings. The author covered some sensitive subjects both directly and indirectly. While they did not directly affect me, they could affect other readers.

I first read this poet in the anthology, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 3 : Halal If You Hear Me. Her poems featured in that anthology really impressed me and I was thrilled to be contacted by the publishers of her recently released collection to receive an advanced copy.

One of Shire’s poems, Midnight in the Foreign Food Aisle, I read previously and is included in this collection. That poem illustrates the reflective nature of Shire’s poetry. The poem begins with her asking a question to her Dear Uncle, “is everything you love foreign or are you foreign to everything you love?” She doesn’t use pretentious words but words that get to the core of what is love, what is home, who we are as people.

I enjoyed this collection and look forward to reading more poetry from this awesome poet! Thank you Random House Books for an advanced copy of the book via Netgalley.

I need more of poetry books about feminism LIKE THIS ONE. i was deeply touched by this work because I found myself in the same shoes as the author, a woman of color, daughter, immigrant. the writing style was very unique and different from everything i've read so far. it was lyrical, politic and true. i really recommend this piece for every daughter. maybe you'll find peace in the words of the author, who knows...

Super understandable, relatable poetry! So often poetry feels… unreachable? I really loved this collection. Just enough.

I don’t usually do poetry, as I have a hard time understanding a lot of it. But I did like this collection; it was straightforward and easily understandable.
Warsan Shire is from Somalia, and a lot of the poems had to do with war and refugees, which felt rather poignant at the moment. There is also a lot about women and mothers, as well as a lot of imagery that relates to motherhood.
I liked that the theme of Bless the… was throughout the book. Many of the poems started with Bless the *insert appropriate term here*, and it helped make the collection of poems feel connected, even when they were about different topics.
A nice collection of poems, good for folks who may have a hard time with poetry.

warsan shire is an amazing literary voice of today harnessing the intergenerational stories that will keep us and our future selves sound.

Thank you so much to Netgalley and Penguin Random House for this eArc! I love love love Warsan Shire ever since I first read her poem "For the Girls Who are Difficult to Love" and was so excited to get the chance to read her first full length poetry collection! It did not disappoint, this was an emotional exploration of girlhood, motherhood, and growing up displaces from your home. It reminded me a lot of Night Sky with Exit Wounds, and I really appreciated the glossary in the back explaining the Somali terms, although I would still suggest reading it through once without referencing it to be able to just experience the whole collection, My favorite poem was Backwards and Bless this House. I can't wait to own a physical copy of this collection,

*Will be posted on our site on March 4th*

Review: Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head

Author: Warsan Shire

Written By: Cy Pacht



“No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.” So begins “Home,” which has had the widest political appeal of any Warsan Shire poem to date; versions of this quote (and others from the poem) have figured on protest signs from Omaha to Jerusalem. The poem proceeds relentlessly from there. “No one would choose to crawl under fences, beaten until your shadow / leaves, raped, forced off the boat because you are darker, drowned, sold, / starved, shot at the border like a sick animal, pitied.” After a string of phrases which sum up a callous European’s bile toward immigrants in general, and Black Africans in particular, comes a point few would contest: “The insults are easier to swallow than finding your child’s body in the rubble.” And, to drive the point home, “No one puts their children in a boat, unless the water is safer than the land.”
These lines might prepare a reader for some of the more emotionally clamorous heights of Shire’s just as often ironic, softly melancholic, and arresting first full-length poetry collection, Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head. These poems are thorough in their account of the fate of people who leave one country, war-torn, only to be poor or degraded in another. Without setting foot in her parents’ native Somalia, she knows their stories well enough to generate a (one hopes) lost world, made of pulled-out teeth and nails and burning women and guns and getaway ships. This ability to tap into cruelties one has never seen firsthand verges on the clairvoyant.
But the gentler sorrows of the refugee experience abound here, too, as when the speaker notes the loneliness of her uncle, whom she sees standing in the “foreign food” aisle, after years of dating women who were “unable to pronounce your name,” and who is now “prostrating in front of the halal meat, praying in a / language you haven’t used in years.” Shire’s mother, or Hooya, fills these pages, and one senses it’s her recollections—or what she attempted, and failed, to forget—that inspired the images behind these poems. So maybe Shire is not clairvoyant. Her Hooya is the “patron saint of / my children have different passports to me”; she grieves things Shire has never possessed:

I don’t recognize my own children
they speak and dream in the wrong language
as much as I understand
it may as well be the language of birds.

The stepwise indentation of these lines, like that of generations, reflects Hooya’s children running away from her. So much fleeing, so little time. (With the exception of the occasional scattered phrase in Somali or Arabic, Shire even wrote this book in the wrong language—English.) And the mother embodies womanhood, the inevitable endpoint of “Extreme Girlhood,” as the first poem of the collection is titled. Hooya is stoic when she isn’t reminiscent; she is

an olm
born without eyes
thriving in the dark
rare and translucent
sustained by so little.

All refugees are. But women refugees, and their daughters, must reckon with the more mundane obstacles of misogyny and repression, on top of their displacement from their home country.
It’s telling that Bless doesn’t begin with “war flaying Somalia alive”—that comes later. It starts, “A loop, a girl born / to each family, / prelude to suffering.” Shire’s poetry operates on this premise, that the female body is the grounds for betrayal. Her juxtapositions of the body with imagery of religion, eroticism and war disturb almost at the same instant they delight and amuse. In “The Abubakr Girls Are Different,” a more developed girl’s nipples are compared to “minarets / calling men to worship.” In a liminal world that is neither fully U.K. nor Somalia, sexuality in women is always shunned. It is place where “there are locked rooms inside all women,” and men are always approaching, knocking, sometimes bearing keys, other times hammers. (“Bless This House” is as stirring an anthem as “Home”; about as graphic, but darkly funny, too.) Qumayos (Somali witches) threateningly eye the girls and try to discern “whose hymen fizzes after dark, / pink fading to black.” Everything the speaker’s hickied teen sister says “sounds like sex,” so “our mother has banned her from saying God’s name.” Shire pithily ‘blesses the Qumayo,’ giving the boot to all internalized misogyny: “we pray you find healing, bitch.”
The publication of Bless has turned out to be more timely than Shire could have anticipated. While “Home” has been around for a while—it began in 2009 in the form of “Conversations about Home (at a deportation centre)” and has gone through various revisions—its famous lines will no doubt grow in relevance as the Ukrainian refugee crisis unfolds. Saying “No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark” should slice through the blather of many a border security fundamentalist. Still, there are subtler, more mysterious, and (dare I say?) more optimistic treasures to be found here, and it is worth the dig. And (again, dare I say?) you may find healing, bitch.

"No one would leave home unless home chased you to the shore. No one would leave home until home is a voice in your ear saying--leave, run, now. I don't know what I've become."

4.5 ✨

Warsan Shire's poetry collection "Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head" was not easy to read but it should be considered essential reading. The included poems deal with the experiences of refugees and immigrants, especially women, as well as loss, trauma, racism, and xenophobia,

My favorite poems were:

- Home
- Bless Your Ugly Daughter
- Backwards
- Bless This House

"Your daughter's face is a small riot,
her hands are a civil war,
she has a refugee camp tucked
behind each ear, her body is a body littered
with ugly things

but God,
doesn't she wear
the world well."

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

I have been a fan of Warsan Shire since the days of Tumblr. Did you know she is also the poet behind Beyoncé’s Lemonade? She has a couple of chapbooks but this is her first full-length poetry collection and it was excellent! Full of deeply moving poems about womanhood, immigrants and refugees, and life. I think this poetry is highly accessible and I would highly recommend checking it out!

This was the first time I’d read Warsan Shire’s poetry and it was a very solid collection. I would definitely be interested in reading more by her, as I know a lot of people love her work.

Please note: there is a glossary at the end of this book. I wish I’d discovered that before I spent so much time puzzling out the meanings of unfamiliar words.

A collection of beautiful poems exploring womanhood and sexuality. #BlesstheDaughterRaisedbyaVoiceinHerHead #NetGalley

Thank you, Random House, for the advanced electronic copy of this book! It’s the first full-length poetry collection from Warsan Shire, the award-winning Somali British poet who worked with Beyonce on Lemonade and Black is King. So yes, it’s as good as you’re expecting.

The poems draw from her own experiences, loved ones’ experiences, headlines, etc. to shape a journey through womanhood, motherhood, daughterhood, being a refugee and immigrant, abuse, trauma, and defiant hope.

I feel like I need to reread this to get the full effect, but I was especially impressed with how Shire merges pop culture and poetry to make the collection feel not only modern but current and timely. She has something to say here, and you’re certainly going to hear it. And, of course, there are lines and couplets and stanzas that come out of nowhere punch you in the gut.

It’s a quick read, but worth it if you are a fan of poetry (and maybe even if you’re not).

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the eARC!

Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head is a powerful collection of poems that talk about growing up as a woman and a person of color in a world that is not friendly to either of those demographics in a variety of ways. It was easy to read and relatively short.
The only reason why I rated this and many other poetry collections three stars is because so many of these poems aren't really poetry. They're just powerful words thrown onto a page with no rhyme or meter at all. I'm definitely not qualified enough to be a poetry critic, but the fact that there isn't poetic structure to it often makes me not like poetry collections such as this.
However, this book does pack a powerful punch and if you do like the format of more modern poetry, this is a must read.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an ebook of BLESS THE DAUGHTER RAISED BY A VOICE IN HER HEAD by Warsan Shire, out on March 1!

There is a ferocious beauty in Shire’s poetry. Faith, parenthood, migration, loneliness, echos of war, a woman’s freedom as a bird’s flight—all of these taste tender on the tongue despite the pain. In particular, I loved “Home,” which speaks to violence against migrants and the circumstances are force them out of their homes and “Lullaby for Father,” which sing fathers’ bodies into sleep, into their final orbit, life winked out like a star.