Publication
Amsterdam Das Mag Uitgevers 2022
ISBN
9789493248182
Language
Collections
Description
"With her first full-length poetry collection, Warsan Shire introduces us to a young girl, who, in the absence of a nurturing guide, makes her own stumbling way towards 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. In Shire's hands, lives spring into fullness. This is noisy life: full of music and weeping and surahs and sirens and birds. This is fragrant life: full of blood and perfume and shisha smoke and jasmine and incense. This is polychrome life: full of henna and moonlight and lipstick and turmeric and kohl"--
Genres
Subjects
User reviews
LibraryThing member BornAnalog
This is a striking, inspirational, difficult collection of poems; while many of them focus on the experience of being an immigrant (and being transplanted across more than one country) many also deal with physical and psychological abuse, both familial and cultural (things like female genital
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mutilation, for example). Many of the pieces are dense with Somali and Arabic and laced with concepts associated with Islam. There's a helpful glossary at the end of the book but I didn't realize that until I got to the end; in the interim I had just googled all the words I didn't know and I feel a learned quite a bit more than the glossary was able to communicate. After all, if you aren't curious, you probably aren't the audience for poetry in the first place! There are many aspects of these poems that I found insightful but one thing I really appreciated was the way in which the idea of "blessing" runs throughout the book. Many of the poems have "Bless the. . ." as the start of the poem (e.g. "Bless the Bulimic," "Bless the Gun Tossed into the River"), and that phrase crops up a lot in the poem themselves. However the phrase is a lot more complex than is typically the case in Western contexts, where it basically evokes a Facebook version of religion where god is handing out "likes" to things that take its fancy. Instead, bless here means something more akin to "remember" or "meditate upon" or even "try to understand." It isn't the bestowal of grace, it is the starting point for an investigation into the multiplicity of the world. Show Less
Awards
Dylan Thomas Prize (Shortlist — 2023)
Books Are My Bag Readers Award (Shortlist — Poetry — 2022)
Notable Books List (Poetry — 2023)
Rise: A Feminist Book Project for Ages 0-18 (Selection — 2023)
BBC 50 Best Books of 2022 (2022)
Original publication date
2022