World Poetry Day is coming up and we bring to you some good poetry reads by BIPOC authors that you should check out!
Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head: Poemsby Warsan Shire | £12.99
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.
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.
Find Warsan Shire’s poetry here
If They Come For Usby Fatimah Asghar | £10.99
Orphaned as a child, Fatimah Asghar grapples with coming of age and navigating questions of sexuality and race without the guidance of a mother or father. These poems at once bear anguish, joy, vulnerability, and compassion, while also exploring the many facets of violence: how it persists within us, how it is inherited across generations, and how it manifests itself in our relationships.
In experimental forms and language both lyrical and raw, Asghar seamlessly braids together marginalized people’s histories with her own understanding of identity, place, and belonging.
Find If They Come For Ushere
The Sun and Her Flowers by Rupi Kaur | £14.99
From Rupi Kaur, the top ten Sunday Times bestselling author of milk and honey, comes a revised hardback edition of her bestselling second collection of poetry.
“this is the recipe of life
said my mother
as she held me in her arms as i wept
think of those flowers you plant
in the garden each year
they will teach you
that people too
must wilt
fall
root
rise
in order to bloom.”
Illustrated by Kaur, the sun and her flowers is a journey of wilting, falling, rooting, rising and blooming. It is a celebration of love in all its forms.
Canadian poet Rupi Kaur’s poetry started as a series on Instagram before Kaur self-published a collected volume, milk and honey, which quickly became a US bestseller.
Find the sun and her flowers here
A Blood Conditionby Kayo Chingonyi | £10
The moving, expansive, and dazzling second collection from award-winning poet Kayo Chingonyi
A Blood Condition tells a story of inheritance – the people, places, cultures and memories that form us. Kayo Chingonyi explores how distance and time, nations and a century’s history, can collapse within a body; our past continuous in our present.
From London, Leeds, and The Northeast to the banks of the Zambezi river, these poems consider change and permanence, grief and joy, the painful ongoing process of letting go, with remarkable music and clarity.
Find A Blood Conditionhere
The Actualby Inua Ellams | £9.99
The Actual is a symphony of personal and political fury-sometimes probing delicately, sometimes burning with raw energy.
In 55 poems that swerve and crackle with a rare music, Inua Ellams unleashes a full-throated assault on empire and its legacies of racism, injustice and toxic masculinity. Written on the author’s phone, in transit, between meetings, before falling asleep and just after waking, this is poetry as polemic, as an act of resistance, but also as dream-vision.
At its heart, this book confronts the absolutism and ‘foolish machismo’ of hero culture-from Perseus to Trump, from Batman to Boko Haram. Through the thick gauze of history, these breath-taking poems look the world square in the face and ask, “What the actual-?”.
Find The Actualhere
