Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head: Shortlisted for the 2022 Felix Dennis Prize

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Perhaps she did so out of respect for Victoria herself, wanting to honor her after her death outside of the lens of her murder, but part of understanding and respecting her story could be found in acknowledging the deep injustice that occurred.

Bless the Daughter is published in a gorgeous hardback edition with the most beautiful end papers that I have ever seen – the folks over at Penguin Random House sure know how I love a good bright HOT PINK! You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. It is full of Arabic words (which are explained in an informative glossary at the end of the collection); it's full of (to-me) foreign music and sounds (of the surahs, the birds, and sirens); it smells of blood, perfume, jasmine and shisha smoke. Within these poems is a woman wrestling her various hauntings: her body a site of savage surveillance, her girlhood a long inventory of violation, her home no longer a home but “the mouth of a shark. With her first full-length, poetry collection, Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice In Her Head, Warsan Shire electrifies.The poems are powerful and I'm always amazed by her capacity to root her poems in the experiences of the body, but I don't know, I expected more exploration. The assonance of ‘veil’ and ‘il’ (the evil eye in Somali culture) is no coincidence, this is a demonstration of Shire’s technical agility that renders the narrative of this assemblage alive across all four sections. By dint of all those blessings and Shire’s sensitivity, the poetry in Bless the Daughter soothes, even while it picks at the scabs of the wounds that cause trauma. Thank you Netgalley and Vintage for the advance copy, which was provided in exchange for an honest review. But Warsan Shire is much more than a viral poem, and with Bless the Daughter Raised By a Voice in Her Head, the 33 year old poets first full-length collection, she shows she has a multitude of words that will all make us better for having heard them.

I can’t attest to the validity but I’ve heard it said that you should translate into the language in which you dream, and this passage brought me the thought of translating oneself into a new country, as well as a person’s hopes and dreams being reconfigured because of the passage to a new country. Bless The Daughter Raised By The Voice In Her Head: Poems” (2022) is written by the multi-award-winning Somali-British author/poet Warsan Shire: who served as the first Young Poet Laurate of London where she was raised after resettlement.Conversely, in “Victoria in Illiyin,” she embodies the voice of the community who has lost “our Victoria. Drawing from her own life, 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 “Drowning in Dawson’s Creek,” Shire uses the first-person voice of a murdered Somali woman, referring to “my carcass” and “my corpse.