Three Female poets you should be reading

In the era of Trump, a society that needs the #MeToo campaign and the unnerving anxiety The Handmaid's Tale brings, poetry is the art form that bites back. Take singer-songwriter Hasley's powerful speech at the NYC Women's March for example. Poetry is successful in tackling the taboo subjects that people find difficult to discuss because there's no shying away from it, it demands to be heard. 

Below are 3 of my favourite female poets in all of their gorgeous glory. Whether you're a keen reader of poetry or not, you're bound to find a piece of yourself hiding between their lines.





Warsan Shire

I've been in love with Warsan Shire's poetry since I started writing. She is best known for her work on Beyoncés Lemonade and her poems speaking out for refugees and victims of FGM (Female Genital Mutilation). If you haven't already heard of her, you're missing out. Shire was born in Kenya to Somali parents and raised in London. She explores what it's like to be laced between two cultures eloquently, capturing intricate and detailed stories of women and their experiences. Her collection, Teaching My Mother how to Give Birth (2011) is bold and beautiful, it tackles many of the taboos in both Somali and British culture with grace. Below is a video of her reading the poems Ugly, The House, The Diet, What We Own and Conversations About Home at the Deportation Centre.

You can find Warsan on Twitter @Warsan_Shire



Pascale Petit

I came across Pascale's work when searching for inspiration at University. With seven successful collections tucked under her belt, Pascale is a master of metaphor. Her poems are often imaginative and mythical; blurring the edges of reality and fantasy. Her latest collection, Mama Amazonica (2017) is set in a psychiatric hospital for endangered species in the Amazon. It tells the story of Pascale's mentally ill mother, morphing her into a series of exotic animals and flowers. I admire Pascale's ability to tackle her personal trauma and turn it into art. Below is a poem from the collection, posted on Pascale's website.

From Mama Amazonica

Picture my mother as a baby, afloat
on a waterlily leaf,

a nametag round her wrist –
Victoria amazonica.

There are rapids ahead
the doctors call ‘mania’.

For now, all is quiet –
she’s on a deep sleep cure,

a sloth clings to the cecropia tree,
a jaguar sniffs the bank.

My mother on her green raft,
its web of ribs, its underside of spines.

I’ll sing her a lullaby,
tell her how her quilted crib

has been known to support
a carefully balanced adult.

My newborn mama
washed clean by the drugs,

a caiman basking beside her.

Cecilia Knapp

Cecilia Knapp is a writer and performer from London. As a successful spoken word poet, she is mesmerising, her rhythms are smooth and seemingly effortless. Her poems take the ordinary and highlight the beauty in the smaller details of everyday life, pull you in and magnify the intricacies of human interaction. 

As well as a poet, Cecilia is also a performer in theatre, runs creative workshops for young people and works with the charity CALM to raise awareness of mental health. Below is her poem Bodies that was turned into a video project with Jungle Magazine. 

You can find more info about Cecilia on her website.





If you have any female poet recommendations, feel free to share them in the comments section.

Sunday Poem

application for the position of abdelhalim hafez's girl

By Safia Elhillo (From The January Children)

i go quiet for days     i turn the colour of mirrors

i turn the colour of smoke     men tell me sometimes

that blue becomes me     when i answer my voice

is hoarse from disuse  i am afraid of my body & the ways

that it fails me   i faint   a woman on the subway platform

catches me   floating into the tracks   i become the colour

blue     i don't like to be touched     i wonder why

more people     have not been kidnapped by taxi drivers

white men ask me     to say their names in arabic

ask where i'm     [really from]     i am six months

returned from sudan     henna fading to look like burns

dusted up my arms     i bleed & can't stop bleeding

i speak & my mouth     is my biggest wound

every language     is a borrowed joke     i catch myself

complimenting strangers   on their english   i am six months

returned from incense smoke   to soften the taste of river water

incense burned   to avert the evil eye   i see a possessed 

woman scream   when a prayer is read   her eyes the color

of smoke     & mine is a story older than water

     

Currently Reading: The Goddess of Mtwara and Other Stories

As January loomed its ugly head, I felt pressure to conform to the cliché ‘New Year, New Me’ set of unrealistic resolutions I knew I would never really stick to. Instead, I wrote a short list of achievable goals, straying away from guilt-inducing diet and exercise regimes in favour of creativity and well being. This blog is one of them, a space to ramble, unclutter my head and hopefully write something interesting. I also intend to read a new book every two weeks, as since finishing Uni I’ve barely been able to finish one, and to read more works by BAME writers.

It was a good coincidence, then, that I was given The Goddess of Mtwara and Other Stories as a gift for Christmas. The book is a collection of short stories born from The Caine Prize for African Writing 2017, featuring talented writers from Africa and the African diaspora. The collection is rich with African culture, transporting the reader to a land humming with the mythical and beautiful. Superstitions thread through everyday life like modern fairy tales, forbidden love leaves your heart hurting and God is loved, cursed and celebrated.

The collection opens with Who Will Greet You At Home, a mysterious tale by Lesley Nneka Arimah exploring motherhood. Ogechi, an expectant mother, creates a baby out of the scraps of hair strewn about the salon that she works in. As part of tradition, expectant mothers make babies out of the strongest and most durable materials they can find, to be blessed by an elder and therefore guarantee a successful birth. Ogechi’s hair baby is glossy and impenetrable, striking warm maternal feelings inside her. But the baby’s strength comes with a never-ending appetite to consume, and Ogechi struggles to keep its hunger satisfied.

The story takes me back to watching Rosemary’s Baby for the first time. Both invert the typical idea of a blissful, loving motherhood and create something a lot more sinister. The idea of the unborn baby having dominance over its mother, out-growing and consuming her is disturbing, which is what makes the story such an interesting read.

Throughout the anthology, taboos are tested, African language is delicately threaded with English and a variety of genres are covered, from the postmodern to the mythical. For example, God’s Children are Little Broken Things (Arinze Ifeakandu) explores the love between two boys at university, An Unperson Stands on the Cracked Pavement Contemplating Being and Nothingness (Tendai Huchu) paints a picture of a monotonous postmodern world through existentialism and Shells modernises myth and confronts the horrors of a deteriorating memory.

Below are some of my favourite quotes from the anthology.

The answers we seek / lie not in the sleep-deprived faces passing. – From An Unperson Stands on the Cracked Pavement Contemplating Being and Nothingness.

When asked by a journalist once about Che after his death, Fidel responded “I dream of him often.” A love letter in five words: I dream of him often. – From Fidel

(He) Patted his mouth clean with a small white square he hand-washed nights, even out in the bush. The desert dyed it that pus-rust colour which bled through sunsets: sunsets that seemingly choked the sky they were so overwhelming. Like swallowing dust. – From The Virus