Warsan Shire’s first pamphlet is small enough to look almost innocuous, which is useful camouflage for what lies within.

Across these poems, the intimate is never merely private because geography, race, religion and exile are already sitting in the room. Shire’s images are often quite physical — hands become maps, bodies hold countries, desire and violence occupy the same sentence — but the poems refuse the temptation of ornamental density that might make any of it easier to look at.

Published when Shire was still in her early twenties, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth was her debut pamphlet and contains much of the vocabulary that would come to define her work. The displacement, the Somali diaspora, mothers and daughters, female sexuality, memory and the unstable meaning of home. There is already a really beautiful, nascent confidence here, particularly in the way Shire lets tenderness sit beside brutality without turning either into explanation. The result feels less like a conventional first collection than the compressed beginning of an entire poetic world.

First edition. Mouthmark Series No. 10, Flipped Eye Publishing, UK, 2011. Softcover poetry pamphlet, 38 pages.