After Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” premiered on HBO for a one-day only event, I’ve listened to the interludes of poetry between each song several times over. It’s just so good. I’ve always loved spoken word and wondered how much of a hand Beyoncé played in the poetry, and who was the writer behind the works. A couple days later I was finally blessed with a name: Warsan Shire.

Warsan Shire is a 27-year-old Kenyan born Somali writer who was raised in London. She was is the first Young Poet Laureate of London and wrote the poetry for Beyoncé’s “Lemonade.” After finding out her name, I was not only excited to see what works she had for me to buy, but also highly impressed by her young age, status as London’s Laureate (an incredibly high and great honor), and the fact that she was African. Her descent wasn’t surprising — Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” featured almost only a cast of African-American and African personalities, so it only makes sense that she would feature work from a prominent and strong black woman. But I just hadn’t expected it — I expected a team of writers, racially mixed, and aged by experiences if not time. But this was one woman.

I bought her book titled “Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth.” I was ready to be amazed and she did not disappoint. Shire talked about the dynamics of family, love, war, diaspora, existential homelessness, sex, physicality, and bonds. She brought my heart up in one sentence and in the next it was sinking further into my chest than I had every felt it hang — a pendulum of rocking emotions and sighs and overly-qualified appreciation. The book only has 21 poems and 34 pages.

In her poem “Conversations About Home,” she describes being the trials foreigners face, especially when they must come to other countries as refugees, running from the traitor they once called home. These people are forced out of the only place they have ever known and greeted by people who assume they want to manipulate their land, but in actuality, the foreigners would be more than happy to return home, if only it were safe. In the poem, a woman is forced out of her home and into a new country with the memories of leaving with the smell of a woman being burned to death in her nose and the heavy weight of fourteen men forcing themselves between her legs. Then, arriving in her new country where she expects to be safe, she explains how the natives tell to to “go home. I hear them say f*cking immigrants, f*cking refugees. Are they really this arrogant? do they not know that stability is like a lover with a sweet mouth upon your body one second; the next you are a tremor lying on the floor covered in rubble and old currency waiting for its return” (Shire, 27).

She reaches out to other topics, spinning a tale about a man from Russia who marries a woman who has never seen snow before. When she asks him what it looks like, they make love and he reaches inside of her and “showed her from her own body what the color of snow was closest to” (13).

I was so in love with her work. Each poem ranged so drastically from the next and yet they all exuded strength and feminine consciousness. A collection of her work is to come out later this year. There is no set date or title yet, but it's already on my reading list.