Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head

With her first full-length poetry collection, Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice In Her Head, Warsan Shire electrifies. Her poems capture young black womanhood, what it means to search for home in the world, what it means to inhabit a woman's body, the tensions of reconciling faith and family and everything that threatens the borders of expectation and obligation. The beautifully crafted poems in this collection are fiercely tender gifts

Roxane Gay

Warsan Shire is both "poet's poet" and "poet of the people" the way Pablo Neruda and Gwendolyn Brooks were both poets beloved by poets as well as the people. Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head is full of ferocious love and truth. It is not overstatement to say Shire writes the way Nina Simone sang. All the brilliance of her lean, monumental Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth is magnified in this remarkable new book

Terrance Hayes, author of National Book Award finalist, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin

Warsan Shire's fierce and compelling book of poems, should come with a warning label: These poems will break your heart. Never has the phrase, speak truth to power, been truer. But Shire does more than speak truth, she sings truth and that is precisely her power. Her poems are incantations, chants, spells for our time and all time. They address the displacements and violence experienced by migrants, refugees, those in dark bodies and in female bodies. Where else to go for safety and salve but poetry? Souls so deep that no cruelty or injustice can drown their song. A warrior woman poet, Shire wields words as a weapon of mass creation. It is a "war" every reader will want to fight with her. And we do, by reading and rereading her poems

Julia Alvarez

Warsan Shire is an expert sculptor. She molds words into clay, her poems into statues-each one a wonder that I return to, in reverence. Because in every line, every curve is an invitation to see differently what has been deemed ugly or difficult.This book is the art gallery I've yearned to visit

Vivek Shraya, author of I'm Afraid of Men

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. This is a book of many gems, to be savoured slowly, allowing each wonderful poem to sink in before progressing to the next one. I will certainly be returning to it again and again

Bernardine Evaristo

Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in her Head is heartbreaking, full-bodied, and luscious. Although they encompass complex themes, the poems are lucid and utterly magically alive, it's almost like the book is a person! If someone from another planet wanted to know what it was like for a woman to survive on earth, they should read this book!

Pascale Petit

Read these candid and revelatory poems to wrap your arms tight around the certainty of your own fracture, to acknowledge the many places and many ways your body has succumbed to violation and only fitfully healed. Read them to know your whole muscled self as a vessel for grief, and to bask in the stuttered lyric of its story. Beauty is maddeningly elusive, but it does exist. It's here in these lines, bursting brilliant, reshaping the story

Patricia Smith, author of Incendiary Art