teaching my mother how to give birth poems

In Her Blue Body (2015), flesh is associated with forms of literal and figurative death, mutilation, or dismemberment: cancer, cliterodectomy, and lost virginity are among its themes. Much of Shire’s poetry to date is written on the body. Shire’s protagonists are typically migrants, sex workers and refugees, and her writing turns upon tropes of dislocation, loss and disorientation. Ironically, such homely associations of belonging, congregation and refuge are typically strangers within Shire’s poetry, which is more often concerned with unhomely realities. Warsan Shire translates her surname as ‘to gather in one place’. Here is a poet who explores how the victims of civil war can end up as refugees in the sometimes hostile host communities of Europe people who have lost everything - family, nation, home’. Fellow poet, Bernardine Evaristo has said of Shire’s poetry that ‘it is entirely her own voice - unflinching and sometimes shocking, yet also exquisitely beautiful, stunningly imaginative, imagistic, memorable - always deeply felt and eminently rereadable.

In 2014, she was named the first Young Poet Laureate for London and chosen as poet-in-residence for Queensland, Australia. In 2013, she won Brunel University’s first African Poetry Prize. She has performed her work internationally at events in South Africa, Italy, Germany, and the United States.

Shire is the poetry editor of Spook Magazine and has guest edited Young Sable LitMag.

Shire’s poetry was adapted for singer Beyoncé’s album Lemonade in 2016. She is the author of the collections Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth (flipped eye, 2011), Her Blue Body (flipped eye, 2015), and Our Men Do Not Belong to Us (Slapering Hol Press and Poetry Foundation, 2015). Her work has appeared in a range of journals and anthologies, including Poetry Review, Wasafiri, Sable LitMag the Salt Book of Younger Poets (2011), Long Journeys: African Migrants on the Road (2013), and Poems That Make Grown Women Cry (2016). Warsan Shire was born in Kenya in 1988 and is a London-based Somali-British writer.

Teaching my mother how to give birth poems