Yrsa Daley-Ward - The How: Notes on the Great Work of Meeting Yourself

[Daley-Ward] has a knack for getting directly to a storys heat-point, and once there, to distill the emotions within it down to a line or two.... [An] impressive debut.

Hanif Abdurraqib, The Atlantic

Yrsas work is like holding the truth in your hands. It sweats and breathes before you.... A glorious living thing.

Florence Welch, of Florence + the Machine

bone opens with a small explosion.... The poems that follow pick up the dual meaning... of threat and of erotic desire. Often, the two are intertwined.... Excellent.

The Paris Review (staff pick)

Who decided that only a picture can paint a thousand words?... [Daley-Ward] examines the alchemy between mind and bodywith subjects ranging from trauma to hunger to desire.

Elle

Daley-Wards short poems cover subjects like depression, falling in and out of love, and sexuality with a fierce staccato that, as the title suggests, cuts deep.

Vogue

[bone is] the one poetry book every young Black girl will appreciate.... [With] poems that touch the heart, question societal norms, and talk about the complexity of sexuality, [Yrsa Daley-Ward has written] a book of great depth.

Essence

Another stunning excavator of human heat and light, Yrsa Daley-Ward goes straight to the messy beating heart of animal attraction with bone, mesmerizing poems that strip bare the pain and beauty of negotiating longing, sex, and love.

HuffPost

The perfect title for a book that looks for that hard place between the will and the flesh.... bone is a bounty of passionate and pained lines, narrators whose hearts have been turned, twisted, and sometimes stomped, but who remain open and willingbecause how else could we live?

The Millions, Must-Read Poetry

[bone] is an interrogation of self, offering a lyrical autopsy on the manner in which we are harmed by the traumas of those who share our dark skin, female gender, and cultural displacement.

Vice

Daley-Ward has become a powerful voice of Black womanhood, speaking of her experiences and wisdom gleaned from growing up as a first-generation British woman of African and Caribbean heritage.

Dazed

[Yrsa Daley-Ward] is at the realm of a new wave of contemporary poets who inspire an unprecedented level of empathy and accessibility through their honest and raw approach.... [A] powerful collection of a woman facing tumultuous inner and external battles head-on, delivered with a hard-hitting directness, yet with inflections of optimism throughout that are bound to touch readers to their core.

i-D

The actor, author, model, and poet draws from her own experiences as well as issues affecting todays society throughout her work and is truly a storyteller (some tall, some dark) of the soul.

POPSUGAR

Inspiringly relatable, Daley-Wards poetry voices acknowledgment and validity. The transparency of exposed darkness is clothed in pretty, but still effective, verses that pack empowering womanly sass.

Saint Heron, 14 Books to Add to Your Library

Praise for The Terrible

Longlisted for the 2019 PEN Open Book Award

Devastating and lyrical.

The New York Times

Though her plainspokenness resembles Rupi Kaurs accessibility, Daley-Ward has a specific story to tell, one that is suspenseful and affecting in its details.

The New Yorker

A coming-of-age memoir... of particular lyricism and bracing honesty.

The New York Times Book Review

A powerful, unconventionally structured memoir recounting harrowing coming-of-age ordeals... Daley-Ward resists classification in this profound mix of poetry and prose.... [She] has quite a ferociously moving story to tell.

Kirkus (starred review)

I tore through Yrsa Daley-Wards poetic memoir The Terrible in a matter of hours.... An impressive take on the memoir that prioritizes emotion over event.

The Paris Review (staff pick)

Profoundly beautiful... [Daley-Ward] interweaves verse and prose to great effect, offering less a simple retelling of her life, and more of an impression of it, a sense of how it must feel to live it. Much of what Daley-Ward recounts of her childhood is devastating... and she has a unique ability to tell these parts of her life with an unflinching intensity, the kind that sears itself onto your skin; and yet this is not a story without hope or love.

NYLON

Absolutely stunning... a poetic look at someones life.

Lauren Christensen, CBS This Morning

[Yrsa Daley-Ward] makes the emotional brutality of dealing with family, adolescence, addiction, and sexuality accessible to her readers.... She continually incorporates gut-wrenching imagery in her work, and in both bone and The Terrible, she packages heightened emotion into just one or two lines.

Ploughshares

Unflinching... The Terribles raw yet lilting prose draws the reader in at once. Unpredictable shifts in form and structurefrom prose to poetry and scriptare refreshingly disorientating. This is both a defiant book and a defiantly inventive one.

The Times Literary Supplement (London)

Open up the first page of Yrsa Daley-Wards genre-defying memoir, and youll find yourself immediately transfixed by her rhythmic language. Daley-Ward unspools the story of her difficult coming-of-age as it felt, forgoing the pacing of a conventional memoir for something more poetic and visceral.... In this book, her unique voice has room to grow roots on the page.

Refinery29

Devastating, in the very best way... generous, utterly human, and, eventually, hopeful.

BuzzFeed

Daley-Ward splits herself wide open in her lyrical memoir.

Bustle

Yrsa Daley-Ward is laying her pain bare and turning it into uplifting, unconventional poetry.... If readers thought she bared her soul through bone, her memoir The Terrible will be another lesson in how to fearlessly turn the pain of her past into uplifting prose.

POPSUGAR

Yrsa Daley-Ward has left all of herself on the page yet again.... An emotional look at growing up.

HelloGiggles

Daley-Ward beautifully recounts her life thus far, equally reflecting on the wonderful and the terrible.

Medium

[The Terrible is] powered by the strains of family separation, sexuality, and dreams.

The Millions

Beautiful and honest.

Joanna Goddard, A Cup of Jo

Penguin Books

THE HOW

Yrsa Daley-Ward is a writer and poet of mixed Jamaican and Nigerian heritage and is the author of bone and The Terrible, the winner of the PEN Ackerley Prize. She splits her time between Brooklyn and London.

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