Poetry News

New York Times Reveals More Details about Warsan Shire

Originally Published: April 29, 2016

After the release of Beyoncé's visual album, Lemonade, this weekend, media outlets have lauded Warsan Shire, the poet whose work is featured in Beyoncé's new work. At New York Times, Amanda Hess reveals more details about Shire: that she can be "sneaky" and how her work was "tailored" for the video. More:

When the credits roll on Beyoncé’s new visual album, “Lemonade,” which had its premiere on Saturday on HBO, one of the first names to flash on screen doesn’t belong to a director, producer or songwriter. It belongs to a poet: Warsan Shire, a rising 27-year-old writer who was born in Kenya to Somali parents and raised in London.

Ms. Shire’s verse forms the backbone of Beyoncé’s album and its exploration of family, infidelity and the black female body.

“I don’t know when love became elusive. What I know is: no one I know has it,” Beyoncé says in a voice-over in the film, lines derived from Ms. Shire’s previously published poem “the unbearable weight of staying — (the end of the relationship).”

She continues: “My father’s arms around my mother’s neck, fruit too ripe to eat. I think of lovers as trees … growing to and from one another. Searching for the same light.”

“Lemonade,” which credits Ms. Shire with “film adaptation and poetry,” may catapult her to a new level of pop-culture fame, but she is already known to many as a compelling voice on black womanhood and the African diaspora — one particularly resonant in the digital age. And her international following, captivated by her quiet charisma and compulsively shareable lines, may be as devoted as the Beyhive.

Ms. Shire has published chapbooks of poetry — including “Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth” in 2011 and “Her Blue Body” in 2015 — but much of her reputation was built online by publishing on Tumblr and using Twitter like an open notebook. In 2014, she was appointed the first Young Poet Laureate of London. Her first full poetry collection, “Extreme Girlhood,” is expected in the next year or so.