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Her Blue Body (2017) imagines a conversation between Alice Walker and Warsan Shire, both phenomenal poets who have collections titled Her Blue Body.

 

As I read their poems, I imagined the ways these two texts/and these two poets could be in conversation with each other. Alice Walker penning Her Blue Body: Everything we know between 1965 and 1990 and published in 1991 and Warsan Shire writing Her Blue Body: during her time as the London poet Laureate and publishing her chapbook in 2015.

 

In this imagined intergenerational conversation, Alice Walker and Warsan Shire, look back acknowledging those who came before them, explore the gaze on the female body and push back against it, while also exploring ‘landscapes’: Shire looking internally at the body, in this case riddled with cancer: and Walker, often writing about physical landscapes, some of her poems in this collection documenting time she spent in Kenya.

 

While this little (11 page) book mostly focusses on their similarly named collections, more of their work in my view could be read in conversation with each other, in a wonderful ode to New Orleans Warsan speaks of how she carried an Alice Walker quote with her, “There are those who believe black people possess the secret of joy and that it is this that will sustain them through any spiritual or moral or physical devastation.”