Regarding the physical structure of the poems themselves, Shire doesn’t use forms that could further the feelings she’s attempting to disseminate through her poems’ content. 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[.

In “Drowning in Dawson’s Creek,” Shire uses the first-person voice of a murdered Somali woman, referring to “my carcass” and “my corpse.

And yet, this is to be expected for a work that aims to share the experience of a specific community with the world. Poems of migration, womanhood, trauma and resilience from the award-winning Somali British poet Warsan Shire, celebrated collaborator on Beyoncé's Lemonade and Black Is King. The line breaks mostly removed to read as prose poetry, Shire revists the poem to discuss the trauma that comes after leaving home and finding yourself lost in a new place. Aside from this poem, though, Shire doesn’t lean into such experimentation with shape and form in a way that enriches the poems’ contents.

It took me eight months to get through this because there were too many lines and entire poems that genuinely made me burst into tears.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. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that her debut collection was one of my most anticipated releases of 2022.