Shire identifies the different ways in which the book may be read, commenting directly on the predicted experiences of her readers.

To say Warsan Shire’s first full-length poetry collection is ‘highly anticipated’ is an understatement. Shire inverts the poem “Backwards,” forcing the reader to reorient themselves and their understanding of the piece. Aside from this poem, though, Shire doesn’t lean into such experimentation with shape and form in a way that enriches the poems’ contents.

Shire introduced readers to her native language (with translations) and to the prayers and customs of her Muslim faith that gave her the strength to endure.

Perhaps Shire is providing her reader with a visceral image of the continuous nature of intergenerational trauma, but at its culmination, the collection continues to lack a narrative which can carry its reader through these deeply harrowing stories. I also love how some known poems are brought in, but are given a new life and a new meaning in the context of the whole collection, a whole girlhood.Shire’s strikingly beautiful imagery leverages the specificity of her own womanhood, love life, tussles with mental health, grief, family history, and stories from the Somali diaspora, to make them reverberate universally. I'd suggest reading this one if it sounds interesting or up your street and making up your own mind. or the traumatised immigrant "She listens to the clamoring voices, oh how blessed she is, how proud they are, how all their hopes depend on her, how walahi, all their dreams lie at her feet. All the torturous vagaries of living-while-woman, living-while-Black, living-while-refugee, written in and through precarity's unassuageable condition. Sono rimasta folgorata da questa raccolta di poesia, la complessità e la varietà dei temi a comporre il mosaico di essere donne migranti, africane, nere, musulmane, divise tra la nostalgia della patria e l’adattamento al mondo occidentale, figlie rifiutate o poco amate… tanti, tantissimi argomenti, ma raccontati con pennellate folgoranti (mi ripeto ma è il termine giusto), dolorose, estremamente vivide ma mai pietose.

It feels weird that Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head is Warsan Shire's first full-length poetry collection. The influential and reworked poem ‘HOME’ lays bare the fallacy and social predicament of refugees; do they enter the western world to freedom? Obviously, you want your work to be used in any way to raise funds for all suffering people, but I want people to know who I wrote that about. Children’ are ‘distant galaxies’ while father ‘hang[s] on the edge of the moon’, as unreachable as innocence lost.She does so through vignettes of her own family and community members in a way that blurs the boundary between blood relations and a greater cultural history. Italicised lyrics chime in a dichotomous weave of pain and suffering as Gloria Gaynor synthesises in our minds, ‘At first I was afraid, I was petrified[. Warsan Shire’s 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.