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Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth

Warsan Shire (Goodreads Author)

4.32 · Rating details · 12,693 ratings · 1,096 reviews

What elevates 'teaching my mother how to give birth', what gives the poems their disturbing brilliance, is Warsan Shire's ability to give simple, beautiful eloquence to the veiled world where sensuality lives in the dominant narrative of Islam; reclaiming the more nuanced truths of earlier times - as in Tayeb Salih's work - and translating to the realm of lyric the work of ...more

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Paperback, 37 pages

Published December 29th 2011 by Flipped Eye

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Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth by Warsan Shire

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Dec 01, 2016 Sean Barrs the Bookdragon rated it really liked it

Shelves: poetry, 4-star-reads, contemporary-lit, postcolonial

Through Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth the empowerment of women becomes like a burning tempest kindled up by the rawness of Warsan Shire’s words. The poems are also about reality, the horrors that some people have to face in a word driven by war. They carry with them such human depth, none more so than the poem In Love and In War.

“To my daughter I will say
‘when the men come, set yourself on fire.’”

The poem is only two lines, but it establishes the tone for the rest of the work; it acts Through Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth the empowerment of women becomes like a burning tempest kindled up by the rawness of Warsan Shire’s words. The poems are also about reality, the horrors that some people have to face in a word driven by war. They carry with them such human depth, none more so than the poem In Love and In War.

“To my daughter I will say
‘when the men come, set yourself on fire.’”

The poem is only two lines, but it establishes the tone for the rest of the work; it acts like a summary for one of her strongest ideals, that of personal and cultural integrity.

Shire does not compromise. The idea of setting oneself on fire is tangible to suicide. The men are coming, the soldiers and sons of war, so let us end it before they can touch us. This can be read as an act by a woman burning herself to avoid the objectifying effects that are coming her way. Historically speaking, the women of an invaded country often become the greatest victims. We all know what humans can do when in a blood frenzy. By committing suicide these daughters can avoid the worse of such possible crimes. But the act of setting oneself on fire can be read in a different way, a much brighter way.

Like all great poetry, multiple readings come out of Shire’s words. I like to think of the fire as a metaphorical flame of individuality. When the invaders come, set your hearts ablaze and remember who you are; remember your culture; remember your language: remember you. When the men come do no lose this sense of you to the superimposing of another’s beliefs. Become angry, fight against it, rage at the injustice and learn how to beat it. But at the very root of it all, never ever forget. In such an idea Shire establishes the authority of the individual’s voice.

How about love? As a woman entering a relationship set yourself on fire in the same sense, do not become meek and docile: do not allow him to take over. This reading feels like one of the strongest. If you compare this to the ideas that are manifested in the spoken word poem For Women Who are Difficult to Love it becomes more evident. The ideas empower women and suggest that if you are volatile, if your personality is like that of a fire, do not quench yourself: carry on. Be yourself, he is not worthy if he cannot love you for you: keep that fire burning.

There’s also another reading that comes here, tangible to the first instance of suicide. When men are near and love is close, set yourself on fire and avoid heartache. But, I do not overly belief in this one; it can be read in the poem, but when comparing it to Shire’s body of work it seems far too pessimistic. Shire is about empowering women not destroying life. She is a humanist; thus, there is much to be taken from her words. They are words that need to be heard now more than ever as the world becomes increasingly multi-cultural and transgendered, understanding the perspective of others is vital for the development of a more accepting world. This is a very powerful collection of poetry. ...more

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Apr 21, 2013 Baba rated it really liked it

Shelves: poetry

4.5 stars. Review posted September 2, 2014. **RE-READ JULY 21, 2016**

If this is not going to touch you what will?

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38 pages that will hit you hard and put life into perspective.

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Conversations About Home
(at the Deportation Centre)

Well, I think home spat me out, the blackouts and curfews like tongue against loose tooth. God, do you know how difficult it is, to talk about the day your own city dragged you by the hair, past the old prison, past the school gates, past the burning torsos erected on ...more

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Dec 13, 2012 Bri Hudson rated it it was amazing

I should mark this as read. However, I carry the book in my purse and have read it everyday since it arrived in the mail. I loved it the moment I opened the first page. The intro hit me like a ton of bricks "I have my mother's mouth and my father's eyes..." that line hit me like a ton of bricks. I love poetry that is plain. That is not left up to interpretation. There is no confusion about what she was trying to say. She masters "show don't tell". I love how her titles are really more like the ...more

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Jul 01, 2019 Lori rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Read and immediately reread—sparse words for raw and terrible things. ...more

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Apr 25, 2019 Cindy Pham rated it really liked it

Warsan Shire writes beautifully - it's very easy to lean into overloading readers with metaphors and flowery language as a crutch, which often suggests amateurish writing; but Warsan expertly handles it with sophistication and purpose. She makes the narratives feel intimate and explores themes like feminism, war, and immigration. I’m not rating this 5 stars because I didn’t personally feel impacted by it, but I still think her writing is solid, mature, and much stronger than other poets I’ve ...more

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Mar 26, 2016 Anne rated it really liked it

Shelves: poetry, brrrrrrr-shake-it-off, war

Today is a good day. Today is a wonderful day - any day that starts out like this is. I found a house full of words. Bold, fearless, silky, abrasive, wounding words. Warsan Shire is a house full of words. Words that don't cuddle you, words that envelope you. There's a deep sense of melancholy to her words and quite a lot of her poems contain explicit content - which I have absolutely no qualms about. If you don't do bold and abrasive, then this probably isn't for you. But personally, I love the Today is a good day. Today is a wonderful day - any day that starts out like this is. I found a house full of words. Bold, fearless, silky, abrasive, wounding words. Warsan Shire is a house full of words. Words that don't cuddle you, words that envelope you. There's a deep sense of melancholy to her words and quite a lot of her poems contain explicit content - which I have absolutely no qualms about. If you don't do bold and abrasive, then this probably isn't for you. But personally, I love the way the words burn, sometimes sweet and silky is just too much of that - sweet and silky. I think that's the beauty of poetry, the creeping subtlety of it's power is you never know which line will sink or float you, make or mar you. You never know which line you'll latch unto and cling to for dear life. I've always thought that poetry emphasizes the delicacy of words and maximizes it's full utility. Where books might be pretentious, extravagant or redundant with fine literary sounding words, I've always thought, in a way, poetry thrives on it. But that's not to say it needs it, simply there's love to be found even in those that prove tedious. Maybe I feel this way because I knew poetry before I knew stories and novels. Some poems in this are more of 3's than 4's but on average, I rated this a 4 because it was a really good collection.

Shire's collection of poetry in order of appearance:
⚫ What Your Mother Told You After Your Father Left
⚫ Your Mother’s First Kiss
⚫ Things We Had Lost in the Summer
⚫ Maymuun’s Mouth
⚫ Grandfather’s Hands
⚫ Bone
⚫ Snow
⚫ Birds
⚫ Beauty
⚫ The Kitchen
⚫ Fire
⚫ When We Last Saw Your Father
⚫ You Were Conceived
⚫ Trying to Swim With God
⚫ Questions for Miriam
⚫ Conversations About Home
⚫ Old Spice
⚫ My Foreign Wife is Dying and Does Not Want To Be Touched
⚫ Ugly
⚫ Tea With Our Grandmothers
⚫ In Love and In War

❗ A little about my favorites:
◾ UGLY

Your daughter is ugly.
She Knows loss intimately,
carries whole cities in her belly

This poem speaks of a foul sense of loss and longing. The type that one wears like a perfume but stinks like a sewer. It's not pretty. It's not the kind of sorrow anyone wants to hold, comfort or be associated with. That kind of heaviness means auto-ostracism. Shire presents that kind of ugly sorrow in this poem. What I love most about it are the last lines which make you think it may be ugly but damn it's beautiful.

Your daughter’s face is a small riot,
her hands are a civil war,
a refugee camp behind each ear,
a body littered with ugly things

but God,
doesn’t she wear
the world well.

◾ Conversations About Home(At the Deportation Centre)
This was cutting. From the title, I think it's fair to say that one knows what to expect from this poem. In this, the speaker's voice is cold, calm and resigned, but underneath that you can detect the anger. Anger at their misfortune. Anger at being run out of their homeland because of something so globally stripping as violence and war. Most of all, they're angry at being turned into a refugee - a symbol of superfluity.

Well, I think home spat me out, the blackouts and curfews like tongue against loose tooth. God, do you know how difficult it is, to talk about the day your own city dragged you by the hair, past the old prison, past the school gates, past the burning torsos erected on poles like flags? When I meet others like me I recognise the longing, the missing, the memory of ash on their faces. No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.

The last stanza made my heart hurt. I know war and I know violence, but rejection - that's something I can't pretend to understand.

I hear them say, go home, I hear them say, fucking immigrants, fucking refugees. Are they really this arrogant? Do they not know that stability is like a lover with a sweet mouth upon your body one second and the next you are a tremor lying on the floor covered in rubble and old currency waiting for its return. All I can say is, I was once like you, the apathy, the pity, the ungrateful placement and now my home is the mouth of a shark, now my home is the barrel of a gun. I'll see you on the other side.

I simply love this poem to bits.

◾ My foreign Wife is Dying and Does not Want To be Touched
Here you can think of all the hurtful names you can call cancer, and it wouldn't stop killing. It wouldn't stop taking.

◾ In Love and War
This poem is very simple. It's three lines.

To my daughter I will say,
‘when the men come,
set yourself on fire’.

❓ WHAT GOT ME INTERESTED IN SHIRE
I was casually strolling by one of my friend's profile when I stumbled upon a poem. And it's titled For Women Who Are Difficult To Love. After reading and rereading it, I hopped on to Youtube to find a reading of it. And I did. I listened to it, again, and I fell in love with it, all over again. I can't tell you what I felt while I listened to it, it was like food to my soul. And those last lines...simply eye-watering and strengthening. So, Hayat didn't really recommend this to me directly, but I feel like she did and I'm so grateful for finding this poem(and writer) through her.

⏩ FOR WOMEN WHO ARE DIFFICULT TO LOVE

you are a horse running alone
 and he tries to tame you
 compares you to an impossible highway
 to a burning house
 says you are blinding him
 that he could never leave you
 forget you
 want anything but you
 you dizzy him, you are unbearable
 every woman before or after you
 is doused in your name
 you fill his mouth
 his teeth ache with memory of taste
 his body just a long shadow seeking yours
 but you are always too intense
 frightening in the way you want him
 unashamed and sacrificial
 he tells you that no man can live up to the one
 who lives in your head
 and you tried to change didn’t you?
 closed your mouth more
 tried to be softer
 prettier
 less volatile, less awake
 but even when sleeping you could feel
 him travelling away from you in his dreams
 so what did you want to do love
 split his head open?
 you can’t make homes out of human beings
 someone should have already told you that
 and if he wants to leave
 then let him leave
 you are terrifying
 and strange and beautiful
 something not everyone knows how to love

The long and short of it is don't doubt your passion, your femininity, or your boldness. Don't make yourself small. Not like that. ...more

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Jan 08, 2017 Clumsy Storyteller rated it liked it

Shelves: 2017-reading-assignment

Short meaningful poems

"Inna lillahi Wa inna ilaihi Rajioon.

My mother says no one can fight it, the body returning to God"

"Sofia used pigeon blood on her wedding night.
Next day, over the phone, she told me
how her husband smiled when he saw the sheets,

that he gathered them under his nose,
closed his eyes and dragged his tongue over the stain.
She mimicked his baritone, how he whispered

her name– Sofia,
pure, chaste, untouched."

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Dec 18, 2016 Whitney Atkinson rated it liked it

Shelves: poetry

3.5 stars

This book was very informative, eye-opening, and interesting. I think I came out of it very shocked because I read books all about Kenya this past semester for school, so catching references about the country and Islam was very neat for me. A lot of these poems are super dark, so trigger warning for domestic violence and rape/sexual assault, but the haunting quality to them made them so addicting and tragic. I ended up reading some of these out loud to my (conservative) mom as she was ...more

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Dec 23, 2014 Hayat rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: books-i-own, repeat-read, non-fiction, freak-out-all-time-faves, inspirational, family-relationships, poetry

Strangely beautiful!

OMG! This book went straight to my heart and and touched my soul because it was disturbing, painfully honest, strangely compelling and beautiful! Warsan Shire is my home girl and I can't wait to read all of her works.

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Feb 20, 2013 Chrissy rated it it was amazing

Shelves: gamechangers, 2013

To my daughter I will say,
'when the men come, set yourself on fire'.

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Nov 04, 2015 Liz Janet rated it really liked it

“To my daughter I will say,
‘when the men come, set yourself on fire’.
– In Love and In War

I first came across Warsan Shire’s poetry through a review of her poem “The Kitchen” by African Soulja, which had the entire poem in it. The rawness between the present events, and the description food, created such a visual image that I knew I was going to love her writing. Her poetry has many similarities to most of my favourite slam poets, and it was only a manner of time before I got my hands on her ...more

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Apr 26, 2014 Anya (~on a semi-hiatus~) rated it liked it

Shelves: made-me-cry, poetry-is-band-aid, cover-gasm, lingual-pheromone, for-my-children, frisson

I have my mother’s mouth and my father’s eyes; on my face they are still together."

And just like that, I was a goner.

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Jan 22, 2017 David Schaafsma rated it really liked it

Shelves: poetry

Yesterday was the Women’s March on DC, NYC, LA, the world, so I read this book of poems by London-based Somali poet Shires, visceral poetry, angry, passionate in every way. This 34 page book will be part of her first full length collection of poetry. Thanks to Liz Janet, whose great review led me to this book.

Here’s some lines and sections of poems from the book I liked a lot:

“I know a few things to be true. I do not know where I am going, where I have come from is disappearing, I am unwelcome ...more

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Mar 10, 2017 Emer (A Little Haze) rated it liked it

Recommended to Emer (A Little Haze) by: Anne

Shelves: 3stars, poetry, reviewed, read2017, adult-fiction

I have been savouring this short book of poems for weeks. It's hard to know how to review this collection as it feels so personal. My experience with the words so intimate. I often picked up this book and read aloud the contents within. And the stillness I found in the quiet of my own voice reading these beautiful words... I simply can't explain it.

Truth. Beauty. Love.

three and a half stars

“Your daughter is ugly.
She knows loss intimately,
carries whole cities in her belly.
....

Your daughter’s

...more

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Aug 31, 2014 Ian rated it liked it

Recommended to Ian by: Baba ♥♥♥ Tyler, Marcus, Archer, Dean, Adrian, Dan & Hunter

Shelves: g-poetry

He was sitting in the hospital parking lot
in a borrowed car, counting the windows
of the building, guessing which one
was glowing with his mistake.

Poetry is difficult, almost impossible to review. It's actually tempting to not review this collection of poems, to not rate it.

But I will...

The poetry I read is a bit of a mixed bag. I have collections by Rabbie Burns, Edgar Allen Poe, Banjo Patterson and e.e.cummings. I like what I like but there is poetry which I know is great that really doesn't ...more

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Apr 22, 2019 Jenny (Reading Envy) rated it it was amazing

Shelves: poetry, read2019

Warsan Shire is one of the poets I was hoping to get to during National Poetry Month and I received two collections through interlibrary loan.

Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth was published first (2011) in the UK, by the English lottery funded mouthmark series. Our Men Do Not Belong To Us is actually a chapbook from the Seven New Generation African Poets: A Chapbook boxed set edited by Chris Abani and Kwami Dawes (2014) Most of the poems in the chapbook are in this collection, so just try for ...more

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Dec 26, 2016 Puck rated it really liked it

Shelves: poetry, people-of-colour

When We Last Saw Your Father
He was sitting in the hospital parking lot
in a borrowed car, counting the windows
of the building, guessing which one
was glowing with his mistake.

Don’t you love it when literature graps you tight and doesn’t let go? Warsan Shire’s bold, beautiful poetry does exactly that. When you are reading this book it feels like the woman is sitting close to you, holding your hand and telling you, with burning eyes and a sharp tongue, her own life story. With her striking words When We Last Saw Your Father
He was sitting in the hospital parking lot
in a borrowed car, counting the windows
of the building, guessing which one
was glowing with his mistake.

Don’t you love it when literature graps you tight and doesn’t let go? Warsan Shire’s bold, beautiful poetry does exactly that. When you are reading this book it feels like the woman is sitting close to you, holding your hand and telling you, with burning eyes and a sharp tongue, her own life story. With her striking words Shire addresses topics like feminism and family bonds, but also the (recent) refugee crisis and female sexuality.

It's 4 a.m. and my older sister winks at me, bending over the sink,
her small breasts bruised from sucking.
She smiles, pops her gum before saying
Boys are haram, don't ever forget that.

My favourite poems are Things We Lost in the Summer, Birds, Ugly and Old Spice, but the greatest impact have the short pieces of prose labelled Conversations about Home (at the Deportation Center). Each piece reads like a protest, an outcry, like a way to give the thousands of immigrants and refugees a voice to tell their story. In our current political climate many people see refugees as a (terrorism) threat and refuse to give them a chance, but Shire's words cut so deep that you can’t turn a deaf ear to them.

Look at all these borders, foaming at the mouth with bodies broken and desperate. I’m the colour of hot sun on the face, my mother’s remains were never buried. I spent days and nights in the stomach of the truck; I did not come out the same. Sometimes it feels like someone else is wearing my body.

The only reason why I won’t give this poetry collection 5 stars is because I think the book would have made a bigger impact if it hadn’t contained so many different topics. However, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth (what a gorgeous title) is a book with poems that often rocked me to my core, and so it’s one I definitely recommend. One a last note: look Shire up on Youtube, because her words are just as powerful spoken out loud as written on a page.

To my daughter I will say,
‘When the men come, set yourself on fire.’
...more

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Jul 29, 2015 Tori (InToriLex) rated it it was amazing

Shelves: non-fiction-to-read, diverse-reads, poetry

Find this and other Reviews at InToriLex

"I have my mother's mouth and my fathers eyes, on my face they are still together."

I don't get a chance to read a lot of poetry, but when I do it pulls at my soul. I stared at the cover of this slim but powerful book for a while. The imaginative and powerful image of a gun going through a woman is enough to think on how my own voice is muzzled by myself but also theenvironmentI'm in. I love this poetand she conveys deep and powerful emotion through

...more

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Jan 07, 2015 Eunice Moral rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites, poetry

The poem Ugly is beautiful, definitely a favorite.

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Jul 09, 2016 Jenna rated it really liked it

Shelves: poetry-in-english, black-writers, chapbooks

This is a slim debut chapbook of vivid, visceral, violent poems by a U.K.-based writer of Somali heritage who has already achieved widespread fame despite her young age (you may have seen her work featured in Beyonce's Lemonade). I was first drawn to her work some months ago after reading her poem "the birth name", which advises readers to "give your daughters difficult names.... my name doesn’t allow me to trust anyone that cannot pronounce it right." (that poem is not included in this This is a slim debut chapbook of vivid, visceral, violent poems by a U.K.-based writer of Somali heritage who has already achieved widespread fame despite her young age (you may have seen her work featured in Beyonce's Lemonade). I was first drawn to her work some months ago after reading her poem "the birth name", which advises readers to "give your daughters difficult names.... my name doesn’t allow me to trust anyone that cannot pronounce it right." (that poem is not included in this chapbook, however).

In one poem in this collection, prepubescent girls hugging each other are described as "waifs with bird chests clinking like wood." Avian imagery resurfaces in a later poem, wherein a bride tricks her husband and in-laws into believing she is a virgin by smearing "pigeon blood" on her bedsheets: the duped mother-in-law is imagined the next morning as "parading / these siren sheets through the town, // waving at balconies, torso swollen with pride, / her arms fleshy wings bound to her body, / ignorant of flight." End poem. Mic drop.

Marriages are depicted over and over as battlefields, rife with acts of violence and deception, fire and blood and bruises and brute cruelty. In one poem, a woman is "visited / by her husband's lover," who not only informs her verbally that her husband has been unfaithful, but goes so far as to "parade / her naked body in the couple's kitchen, / lifting her dress to expose breasts / mottled with small fleshy marks, / a back sucked and bruised." (That word "parade" again: public life and private life ever intermixing.) The wife's response to this provocation (which I shan't give away here) is equally, if not more, emblematic of emotional excess. These poems are largely about women, women using their agency in ways good, bad, and ugly.

In Shire's writing, sex imagery bleeds into the imagery of war/refugee life, and vice versa: war metaphors are used to describe sex just as often as sex metaphors are used to describe war. A war refugee in one poem laments, "I want to lay down, but these countries are like uncles who touch you when you're young and asleep." The poem continues: "I hear them say fucking immigrants, fucking refugees. Are they really this arrogant? Do they not know that stability is like a lover with a sweet mouth upon your body one second; the next you are a tremor lying on the floor...." This poem ends with another powerful mic drop: "All I can say is, I was once like you, the apathy, the pity.... I'll see you on the other side." ...more

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Jan 06, 2017 Trish rated it really liked it

Shelves: poetry

Last night in bed I swear I thought my body was on fire.

What a lovely and eloquent little book. The tone, subject matter, and emotion in this one really stands out among the numerous modern poetry collections.

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Jun 08, 2016 Sofia rated it it was amazing

Shelves: poetry, 2016

I only opened the book to take a peek
And then I only moved to sit more comfortably as I read

Poetry of all the senses and the emotions and the feelings

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Oct 03, 2016 Mahima rated it it was amazing

My god, Warsan Shire writes beautiful poetry! And I mean it when I say that. This is beautiful poetry. Brutally beautiful.

I'm just going to quote some of the lines here that I found to be the most beautiful.

"Your grandfather's hands were brown.
Your grandmother kissed each knuckle,

circled an island into his palm
and told him which parts they would share,
which parts they would leave alone.

She wet a finger to draw where the ocean would be
on his wrist, kissed him there,
named the ocean after ...more

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May 30, 2013 Cat rated it it was amazing

Shelves: books-i-read-in-a-day, favorites, well-thumbed

“I glow the way unwanted things do, a neon sign that reads; come, I still taste like someone else’s mouth.”

I stumbled upon Warsan Shire's work after attending a spoken word event when I was in New York last summer. Not something that is so popular here in England, i was intrigued.

This book is amazing. Warsan Shires work is amazing, and some of her poems in this book made me tear up and wonder at how we all have ths same words, but only a special group of people can craft and place them so ...more

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Jun 20, 2018 Robyn rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2018

Because it’s World Refugee Day, and I’ve been reading Shire’s poem, Home, over and over, I decided it was time to read this one too.

Beautiful and horrifying. Glad I picked up this short volume.

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Feb 22, 2017 HajarRead rated it liked it

Poems about refugees, war and violence against women were brilliant.

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Apr 04, 2016 Frances rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites, women-authors, poetry

I have my mother’s mouth and my father’s eyes; on my face they are still together.

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Apr 12, 2017 leynes rated it liked it

Shelves: black-writers, african-writers

Warsan Shire is a Kenyan-born Somali poet and writer who is based in London. Born in 1988, she uses her work and art to document narratives of journey and trauma, so also in Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth.

To my daughter I will say,
'when the men come, set yourself on fire.'

To be quite honest with you, this collection was more miss than hit for me, but I still decided to go for quite the high rating of 3 stars, because I think that Warsan as a poet has a lot of potential, and because the Warsan Shire is a Kenyan-born Somali poet and writer who is based in London. Born in 1988, she uses her work and art to document narratives of journey and trauma, so also in Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth.

To my daughter I will say,
'when the men come, set yourself on fire.'

To be quite honest with you, this collection was more miss than hit for me, but I still decided to go for quite the high rating of 3 stars, because I think that Warsan as a poet has a lot of potential, and because the themes she discusses in these poems are fucking important, and worthy of a high rating.

In this collection she discusses topics such as sexual abuse, domestic violence, immigration/ finding a home away from home, loss and love. Topic-wise it is quite similar to Rupi Kaur's Milk and Honey, but whereas the latter (IMO) writes Tumblr-poetry, Warsan's language is much more sophisticated. I am not a huge fan of poems who are simple one-liners, and therefore I was very happy to learn that Warsan's poems are usually quite long (only 2 of the 21 poems in this collection are one-liners). However, Warsan's language lacks brilliance. I am a huge fan of traditional poetry with all its meter and rhymes, however I can enjoy modern free verse poetry if it is done in a clever way, e.g. Saul Williams' poetry. In most of the poems, I found Warsan's language to be just ordinary, nothing special, nothing memorable; however there were a few poems that packed an emotional punch, and I have to admit that part of the reason was the beauty of her language. Therefore, I concluded (for myself) that Warsan has a lot of potential. This isn't meant in a degrading way, I mean "potential" in the way that I might enjoy future works of hers. That's all. It's not objective.

This collection would have been better if she had just focused on one topic, e.g. immigrations, and not featured all of these different traumas. Due to the fact that each trauma only got 2-3 poems at most, I as a reader couldn't get invested into them. In the moment in which I wanted to immerse myself in her poems and the pains she described I was pulled out because she started talking about another problem. It was quite jumbled, quite overwhelming. I like to get deep into subject matters, and due to the few amount of poems dedicated to each problem, it felt superficial - that might be the wrong word, what I really mean is that it felt like Warsan was brushing over these topics without giving the reader the time to digest them properly.

My favorite portion of this collection were definitely the poems about immigration - Conversations about home (at a deportation centre):

Well, I think home spat me out, the blackouts and curfews like tongue against loose tooth. God, do you know how difficult it is, to talk about the day your own city dragged you by the hair, past the old prison, past the school gates, past the burning torsos erected on poles like flags? When I meet others like me I recognise the longing, the missing, the memory of ash on their faces. No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark. I've been carrying the old anthem in my mouth for so long that there’s no space for another song, another tongue or another language. I know a shame that shrouds, totally engulfs. I tore up and ate my own passport in an airport hotel. I’m bloated with language I can't afford to forget.

*
I know a few things to be true. I do not know where I am going, where I have come from is disappearing, I am unwelcome and my beauty is not beauty here. My body is burning with the shame of not belonging, my body is longing. I am the sin of memory and the absence of memory. I watch the news and my mouth becomes a sink full of blood. The lines, the forms, the people at the desks, the calling cards, the immigration officer, the looks on the street, the cold settling deep into my bones, the English classes at night, the distance I am from home. But Alhamdulilah all of this is better than the scent of a woman completely on fire, or a truckload of men who look like my father, pulling out my teeth and nails, or fourteen men between my legs, or a gun, or a promise, or a lie, or his name, or his manhood in my mouth.

Sadly, most of the other poems weren't as gripping, raw and real as these two. Therefore overall this collection could have been better. Nonetheless I'm happy that I got to know her work and I'm willing to check out more of it. ...more

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Jul 14, 2015 Leigh Anne rated it it was amazing

Shire's poem is very much grounded in the body; the main themes of this collection are sex and violence, as well as the relationships between mothers and daughters. The body is the medium for all of these themes: either the poem contains concrete imagery on the body and what it does/what has been done to it, or it speaks of the fraught relationship mothers and daughters have, often over, and through, the body of the maturing daughter. These poems are also specifically located within place ...more

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Jul 13, 2017 Joanka rated it really liked it

Shelves: non-fiction, women, africa, immigrant-themes, poetry

It's a small but powerful collection of poems that really resonated with me. Some poems were simply transfixing, others didn't make that impression on me but still I perceive them to be really good. I read one of them translated into Polish by Karolina Bednarz and it proved that they work in translation really well, so it would be amazing to have this collection published in Poland as it is an important voice in many current discussions.

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About Warsan Shire

Warsan Shire

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Warsan Shire is a 24 year old Kenyan-born Somali poet, writer and educator based in London. Born in 1988, Warsan has read her work extensively all over Britain and internationally - including recent readings in South Africa, Italy, Germany, Canada, North America and Kenya- and her début book, 'TEACHING MY MOTHER HOW TO GIVE BIRTH' (flipped eye), was published in 2011. Her poems have been published ...more