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*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 FELIX DENNIS PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION*
** AS HEARD ON BBC RADIO 4**

‘Warsan Shire is an extraordinarily gifted poet whose profoundly moving poems so powerfully give voice to the unspoken’ Bernardine Evaristo

‘Vital, moving and courageous, this is a debut not to be missed’ Guardian
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Poems of migration, womanhood, trauma and resilience from the award-winning Somali British poet Warsan Shire, celebrated collaborator on Beyonce’s Lemonade and Black Is King.

With her first full-length poetry collection, Warsan Shire introduces us to a girl who, in the absence of a nurturing guide, makes her own stumbling way toward 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. These are noisy lives, full of music and weeping and surahs. These are fragrant lives, full of blood and perfume and jasmine. These are polychrome lives, full of moonlight and turmeric and kohl.

The long-awaited collection from one of our most exciting contemporary poets is a blessing, an incantatory celebration of survival. Each reader will come away changed.

‘Warsan Shire electrifies… The beautifully crafted poems in this collection are fiercely tender gifts’ Roxane Gay

‘Absolutely beautiful… So relevant’ Elizabeth Day, *Day’s Delights*

Publisher Review

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 -- Bernardine Evaristo It is absolutely astonishing how much emotion, intelligence, imagination, and truth Warsan Shire can get into one collection. She is a poet of the highest order, with a compassionate heart, and a limitless mind -- Benjamin Zephaniah 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 -- Terrance Hayes, author of National Book Award finalist, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin 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! -- Pascale Petit 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... Enthralling... The poetry in Bless the Daughter soothes, even while it picks at the scabs of the wounds that cause trauma -- Dzifa Benson * Daily Telegraph *