For much of his life, Dogon and his family ate barely enough to keep themselves from starving. Even though Rwanda famously has a former refugee for a president in Paul Kagame, refugees in that country face enormous prejudice and acute want. Hideous violence stalked them in the camps. But their search for a safe haven had just begun. They made their way to the first of several UN tent cities in which they would spend decades. Dogon's family fled into the forest, initiating a long and dangerous journey into Rwanda. One day when Mondiant Dogon, a Bagogwe Tutsi born in the Democratic Republic of Congo, was only three years old, his father's lifelong friend, a Hutu man, came to their home with a machete in his hand and warned the family they were to be killed within hours. Each reader will come away changed.A stunning and heartbreaking lens on the global refugee crisis, from a man who faced the very worst of humanity and survived to advocate for displaced people around the world.
The long-awaited collection from one of our most exciting contemporary poets, this book is a blessing, an incantatory celebration of resilience and survival. This is polychrome life, full of henna and moonlight and lipstick and turmeric and kohl. This is fragrant life, full of blood and perfume and shisha smoke and jasmine and incense. This is noisy life, full of music and weeping and surahs and sirens and birds. In Shire's hands, lives spring into fullness. Drawing from her own life, 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. With her first full-length poetry collection, Warsan Shire introduces us to a young girl, who, in the absence of a nurturing guide, makes her own way toward womanhood.
Mama, I made it / out of your home / alive, raised by / the voices / in my head. "Shire is the real thing-fresh, cutting, indisputably alive."-Dwight Garner, The New York Times "The beautifully crafted poems in this collection are fiercely tender gifts."-Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist Poems of migration, womanhood, trauma, and resilience from the celebrated collaborator on Beyoncé's Lemonade and Black Is King, award-winning Somali British poet Warsan Shire
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