Book 14

Her Blue Body

by Warsan Shire

Published May 2016
Through her role as London's first Young Poet Laureate, Warsan Shire turned her eye to the city, interrogating the capital and its continuing transformation, even while lending voice to its oft unheard or under-represented communities and spaces. Collecting work authored during Shire's tenure, 'Her Blue Body' stands as testament and witness, negotiating the complexities of heritage, cultural sensitivity, sensuality, trauma and womanhood, framed and ordered by a sequence of memorial poems, focused through the lens of Shire's intimate and unflinching vision.