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WORK TITLE: The Terrible
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1989
WEBSITE: http://www.yrsadaleyward.net/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: British
She splits her time between London and Los Angeles.
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1989.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and poet.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Yrsa Daley-Ward is a writer and poet. She is British and lives in London, England and Los Angeles, California. Daley-Ward first became known for acquiring a following on Instagram, a social media app on which she has posted her poetry. In an interview with Lovia Gyarkye, contributor to the New York Times Online, Daley-Ward commented on being labeled an “Instagram poet.” Of herself and other poets who post work on Instagram, she told Gyarkye: “We are doing the poetry world a service. … I think it is a wonderful thing that poets are now sharing their work online because work gets into the hands of people of different identities and they feel like they have a voice.”
Bone
In 2017, Daley-Ward released her first collection of poetry, called Bone. One of the longer works in the book is “It Is What It Is.” The narrator of this piece recalls her childhood and suggests that she is currently experiencing depression. A turbulent relationship between characters called Samuel and Benny is the focus of “Some Kind of Man.” This poem finds Samuel cheating on Benny at one point and treating her with kindness and care at another. In “Lipsing,” the narrator discusses communication between lovers. The last poem in the collection is “Dankyes (Mwaghavul),” which emphasizes the uniqueness of one particular day.
Elisa Sabbadin, reviewer on the Pendora website, suggested: “The collection is ultimately saved from being dark and obsessive. The poems are also full of light, and of strength, and of warmth. Sometimes, they are touching. It is also true, however, that they are not always easy to relate to, and that the repetitiveness of certain themes and moods might be heavy on people.” Writing on the Atlantic website, Hanif Abdurraqib commented: “It’s to Daley-Ward’s credit that what makes her writing shine in screenshots also makes it shine on the page. She has a knack for getting directly to a story’s heat-point, and once there, to distill the emotions within it.” Abdurraqib added: “Most of Bone’s work is structured in flowing prose blocks, or as spaced-out lines that drift down the white space of a page. But what the collection lacks in diversity of form, it makes up for in the layered ingenuity of its narratives.” Abdurraqib also stated: “It honestly excavates a writer’s life, not simply presenting pain, but also showing an individual working through it.”
The Terrible
In The Terrible: A Storyteller’s Memoir, Daley-Ward combines prose and poetry to share the story of her family and her life. She begins by discussing her parents’ history. Her mother was born in Jamaica. When she was a teen, she became pregnant, and her parents sent her to England. Daley-Ward’s mother had a relationship with her father, who was Nigerian and married. Daley-Ward never met him. She recalls being raised primarily by her mother’s parents, who were devoutly religious and part of the Seventh-Day Adventist church. Daley-Ward experienced depression and anxiety as a young woman and escaped it through sex and partying. While in South Africa, working as a model, she came to write poetry. Daley-Ward also discusses her close relationship with her half-brother, Roo, who has also experienced depression.
A Kirkus Reviews contributor described The Terrible as “a powerful, unconventionally structured memoir recounting harrowing coming-of-age ordeals.” The same contributor concluded: “The subtitle is apt: Daley-Ward has quite a ferociously moving story to tell.” “Some readers will be put off by the start-stop nature of this extraordinary narrative. Others will be thrilled by its honesty,” predicted Katy Guest on the London Guardian Online. Anna van Praagh, writer on the London Evening Standard Online, commented: “Yrsa Daley-Ward’s story of her life and all the things that happened … is a rare combination of literary brilliance, originality of voice and a narrative that commands you to keep going until you’ve reached the last page.” Van Praagh added: “Her poetry is moving and original. … Her prose is invigorating, razor-sharp and moves at the speed of light. Yrsa Daley-Ward is an explosive new talent and this book should not be missed.” Reviewing the book on the Sydney Morning Herald Online, Fiona Capp called it “a hybrid of cryptic, spoken-word poetry and punchy prose.” Katy Waldman, critic on the New Yorker Online, suggested: “Despite the provenance of its author, The Terrible does not feel entirely Instapoetic. It is not minimalist. While the book itself can fit inside a large jacket pocket, the language is frequently incantatory, repetitive, or manic. Though her plainspokenness resembles Rupi Kaur’s accessibility, Daley-Ward has a specific story to tell, one that is suspenseful and affecting in its details, whereas Kaur aspires to universality, featurelessness.” Waldman continued: “Daley-Ward is often intentionally funny, and reluctant to wallow in suffering or self-pity. She is less interested in inspiring readers or glamorizing herself than in voicing, with what can seem like sincere surprise, the contents of her mind.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 2018, review of The Terrible: A Storyteller’s Memoir.
ONLINE
Atlantic Online, https://www.theatlantic.com/ (December 31, 2017), Hanif Abdurraqib, review of Bone.
London Evening Standard Online, https://www.standard.co.uk/ (May 31, 2018), Anna van Praagh, review of The Terrible.
London Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (June 8, 2018), Katy Guest, review of The Terrible.
New Yorker Online, https://www.newyorker.com/ (June 13, 2018), Katy Waldman, review of The Terrible.
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (June 7, 2018), Lovia Gyarkye, author interview.
Pendora, https://www.pendoramagazine.com/ (September 25, 2017), Elisa Sabbadin, review of Bone.
Sydney Morning Herald Online, https://www.smh.com.au/ (June 22, 2018), Fiona Capp, review of The Terrible.
Yrsa Daley-Ward website, http://www.yrsadaleyward.net/ (June 28, 2018).
ABOUT YRSA DALEY-WARD
Photo of Yrsa Daley-Ward
Yrsa Daley-Ward is a writer and poet of mixed West Indian and West African heritage. Born to a Jamaican mother and a Nigerian father, Yrsa was raised by her devout Seventh Day Adventist grandparents in the small town of Chorley in the North of England. She splits her time between London and Los Angeles.
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Christopher Smith: chsmith@penguinrandomhouse.com
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QUOTED: "We are doing the poetry world a service. ... I think it is a wonderful thing that poets are now sharing their work online because work gets into the hands of people of different identities and they feel like they have a voice."
6/24/2018 Meet Yrsa Daley-Ward, the Bard of Instagram - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/07/books/meet-yrsa-daley-ward-the-bard-of-instagram.html 1/7
Meet Yrsa Daley-Ward, the Bard of
Instagram
The British poet on her new lyrical memoir, “The Terrible,” and why she thinks Instagram
poets are doing the genre a service.
By Lovia Gyarkye
June 7, 2018
On a rainy Wednesday in April, a crowd of 70 people squeezed into the Strand Bookstore at the
Club Monaco on Fifth Avenue for a poetry reading by Yrsa Daley-Ward, the British model and
writer. Attendees leaned against the well-curated bookshelves or sat cross legged on the floor as
waiters maneuvered through the room, offering them a choice of red or white wine.
Minutes before the program began, Ms. Daley-Ward sauntered into the room and plopped herself
onto a slate gray love seat at the front. She wore an all white ensemble — a blouse, loosefitting
shorts and a vest she casually threw to the side.
“I think you need to hear a poem about mental health,” she said before launching into “mental
health,” one of the most popular poems from her 2014 collection, “Bone.” When she finished, the
room exploded in applause for Ms. Daley-Ward, who has comforted hundreds of thousands of fans
with her cleareyed poetry on Instagram for the last five years.
6/24/2018 Meet Yrsa Daley-Ward, the Bard of Instagram - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/07/books/meet-yrsa-daley-ward-the-bard-of-instagram.html 2/7
Ms. Daley-Ward is part of a new generation of writers using social media to share their work and
find their audience. Erik Tanner for The New York Times
6/24/2018 Meet Yrsa Daley-Ward, the Bard of Instagram - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/07/books/meet-yrsa-daley-ward-the-bard-of-instagram.html 3/7
Ms. Daley-Ward, whose memoir, “The Terrible,” was published this week by Penguin Books, is
part of a new generation of writers using social media to share their work, build their brand and
find an audience. According to a recent study from the Pew Research Center, 72 percent of
teenagers in the United States report using Instagram, making it the second most popular online
platform, after YouTube.
The millennials who post short, visually pleasing prose online are commonly referred to as
“Instagram poets” and their recent popularity has been met with equal parts enthusiasm and
skepticism. They use the platform in multiple ways: adding images to their poems, taking photos
of printed text or, in the case of Ms. Daley-Ward, filming their laptop screens as they write.
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Unlike some of her more famous and controversial peers, such as Rupi Kaur and Cleo Wade, Ms.
Daley-Ward has also found critical success.
“I think in the context of Instagram poetry she is one of the more interesting poets,” said Chris
McCabe, a librarian at the National Poetry Library in London’s Southbank Centre. “She is much
more textured and subtle.”
Kiese Laymon, a writer and professor at the University of Mississippi who wrote the foreword for
“Bone,” was introduced to Ms. Daley-Ward’s poems by his students, who showed him her poem
“emergency warning.”
“I couldn’t believe I was reading what I was reading on the internet,” he said. “And I’m not
someone who diminishes the internet at all, but there was a particular kind of emotional register
that I just didn’t think the internet could really hold.”
On a Saturday, several days after the Club Monaco event, I met Ms. Daley-Ward for brunch at a
Mediterranean-Italian restaurant in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn. She has just moved to
the neighborhood from Los Angeles after a New York City literary agent, who was impressed by
“Bone,” asked her if she had other material to share.
“I know with these things you kind of have to strike,” Ms. Daley-Ward said. “So I was like yeah of
course! Complete lies, I had nothing.”
She quickly wrote three chapters of what she imagined would become a novel about children and
magical realism. The book morphed into a memoir after she realized how much she mined her
personal experiences for material.
6/24/2018 Meet Yrsa Daley-Ward, the Bard of Instagram - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/07/books/meet-yrsa-daley-ward-the-bard-of-instagram.html 4/7
“I’m going to unsettle people,” she said. “I mean nobody knows my story.”
Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times
“The Terrible” is a devastating and lyrical account that begins with Ms. Daley-Ward’s childhood
in Chorley, a small town in northern England where she was shuffled between her single mother
and her religious grandparents. Early chapters focus on her tense relationship with her mother
(“I am angry with Mum a lot these days because we love her so much and we never see her”),
struggling with her sexuality (“She is a petite girl and my T-shirt totally drowns her. My insides
ache with longing”) and being raised as a Seventh-day Adventist (“We sing lots of hymns with
words like, ʻWash me and I shall be whiter than snow’”).
Most of the book focuses on her life after she turned 12, the age which marked the beginning of
“the terrible” and “going under.” These are euphemisms for “depression, anxiety, suicidal
thoughts, addiction,” Ms. Daley-Ward said.
She recounts struggling with her rapidly developing body (“feel fat”), dealing with advances from
older men including a friend’s father (“Make an excuse the next time he wants to drive you
home”) and how her first sexual experience at 14 worsened her depression (“You smell /
different. There’s a weird scent / about you / some male odor. The man left his smell behind / all
over you”). She writes about becoming a model and how parts of the lifestyle drove her into a
cycle of partying, drinking, sex and drugs.
“I was running from the cloak of depression,” Ms. Daley-Ward said. “I was living in London and I
was like, well let me just fly somewhere new and work it out.”
6/24/2018 Meet Yrsa Daley-Ward, the Bard of Instagram - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/07/books/meet-yrsa-daley-ward-the-bard-of-instagram.html 5/7
“I am going to unsettle people — I mean nobody knows my story,” Ms. Daley-Ward said.
Erik Tanner for The New York Times
She moved to South Africa and spent three years there modeling and waitressing. About a year
and a half into her stay, she stumbled upon a poetry reading at Tagore’s, a popular jazz venue in
Cape Town. “The Terrible” closes with this moment, which inspired her to pursue a writing
career.
“There is a magic about Cape Town, the mountains and the fog on the mountain and the blue sky,”
Ms. Daley-Ward said, “something about it is very calming, it is very easy for me to write there.”
She eventually published a collection, “On Snakes and Other Stories,” in 2013 with a small British
press. The next year she repurposed many of those poems and self-published her second
collection, “Bone,” which sold more than 20,000 copies.
6/24/2018 Meet Yrsa Daley-Ward, the Bard of Instagram - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/07/books/meet-yrsa-daley-ward-the-bard-of-instagram.html 6/7
Ms. Daley-Ward’s fans on Instagram and Twitter see her poems as a tool for healing. Most of
them are drawn to her willingness to broach difficult subject matter with authority and clarity. “I
found a physicality and an honesty in Yrsa’s work that really captured me,” wrote Florence Welch
of the band Florence + The Machine in an email. “Many of her poems have that feeling, a sudden
gasp of truth.”
Mr. McCabe thinks more attention should be paid and credit given to the power that Instagram
poetry has on young people as a catalyst for change. “It’s not just break-up poems,” he said. “It
shows that a whole generation are interested in politics and in trying to change the world through
art.”
At the end of the Club Monaco event, members of the audience lined up for autographs.
“She feels like a sister to me,” said Mimi Chiahemen, an editor and reiki practitioner. She found
Ms. Daley-Ward’s poetry on Instagram through Nayyirah Waheed, another poet, and was
immediately impressed by her ability to convey such emotional depth in few words.
“I actually think it’s very challenging to write evocative poetry with so much brevity,” she said,
comparing Ms. Daley-Ward to poets like Mary Oliver and E.E. Cummings.
When I asked Ms. Daley-Ward if she had any feelings about being labeled an Instagram poet, she
smiled.
“We are doing the poetry world a service,” she said. “I think it is a wonderful thing that poets are
now sharing their work online because work gets into the hands of people of different identities
and they feel like they have a voice.”
6/24/2018 Meet Yrsa Daley-Ward, the Bard of Instagram - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/07/books/meet-yrsa-daley-ward-the-bard-of-instagram.html 7/7
"We are doing the poetry world a service," Ms. Daley-Ward said. Erik Tanner for The New York Times
A version of this article appears in print on June 7, 2018, on Page C13 of the New York edition with the headline: A Bard Of Instagram
QUOTED: "a powerful, unconventionally structured memoir recounting harrowing coming-of-age ordeals."
"The subtitle is apt: Daley-Ward has quite a ferociously moving story to tell."
Daley-Ward, Yrsa: THE TERRIBLE
Kirkus Reviews. (Apr. 15, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Daley-Ward, Yrsa THE TERRIBLE Penguin (Adult Nonfiction) $16.00 6, 5 ISBN: 978-0-14-313262-2
A powerful, unconventionally structured memoir recounting harrowing coming-of-age ordeals.
Though she earned acclaim for her debut poetry collection, bone (2014), Daley-Ward resists classification in this profound mix of poetry and prose. Her Jamaican mother was sent to live in England during her first, teenage pregnancy. Her father, whom she never met, was Nigerian, married to someone else. The author was raised entirely in England, largely by her maternal grandparents, Seventh-Day Adventists. She discovered her poetic calling on a pilgrimage to Africa, after drugs and depression had left her at the end of her rope. Before then, she had worked as a model and aspired to be a singer, though her most lucrative source of income was sex work. The one main constant in her life has been her younger brother, Roo, who attempted suicide after their mother's death. Roo had a different father than his sister, who had a different father than their older brother. Their mother subsequently had a series of boyfriends, some of whom played quasi-dad to the offspring none of them had fathered. "I think about these parents of ours / our makers / our stars. (Such impossible, complex stars.)," she writes. "How they came, exploded, / and fell away." Daley-Ward had developed well before her teens, both physically and mentally, so much that her mother feared her then-boyfriend would have sexual designs on her and sent her to her strict grandparents. She soon became aware of the attention her looks brought her, and she exercised her power to attract men and feared the power they might have over her. She abused alcohol and drugs, both to feel something and not to feel anything, and she found older men willing to support her. Then she got engaged to a man who truly loved her but whom she sensed she didn't deserve. "I don't think that I'll live a particularly long life," she writes. "It doesn't bother me. You gather speed when you're descending."
The subtitle is apt: Daley-Ward has quite a ferociously moving story to tell.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Daley-Ward, Yrsa: THE TERRIBLE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A534375245/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2b0284bc. Accessed 24 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A534375245
QUOTED: "Some readers will be put off by the start-stop nature of this extraordinary narrative. Others will be thrilled by its honesty."
The Terrible by Yrsa Daley-Ward review – a wincingly honest coming-of-age memoir
The extraordinary, troubled life story of the model, actor and ‘Instagram poet’ has a prose-poetry all her own
Katy Guest
Fri 8 Jun 2018 03.59 EDT Last modified on Fri 8 Jun 2018 19.10 EDT
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Yrsa Daley-Ward: ‘The truest thing I’ll maybe ever write.’
Yrsa Daley-Ward: ‘The truest thing I’ll maybe ever write.’ Photograph: Phillip Faraone/WireImage
Shortly after her collection of poetry, bone, was published in 2017, Yrsa Daley-Ward predicted that this memoir would be “The truest thing I’ll maybe ever write.” It begins: “My little brother and I saw a unicorn in the garden in the late nineties …” There may be truth in this memoir, but not in the traditional sense. But then, her writing is anything but traditional.
Daley-Ward made her name as an “Instagram poet”, publishing short, pithy and deeply personal lines next to selfies and carefully curated images. It is a form that has enraged some poetry lovers and delighted many more, and The Terrible will probably have the same effect. It has echoes of Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Max Porter’s Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, but is uniquely itself. The Daley-Ward in the book reinvents herself several times; her story involves drugs, depression, sex work and modelling. She has devised a form that combines first and third person, poetry and prose, upside-down printing, and wincingly honest streams-of-consciousness about sexuality and physicality that sometimes make for difficult reading.
Essentially, this is the story of Yrsa, the child of a Jamaican mother, Marcia, and a Nigerian father she never meets, who grows up in a northern English market town with her beloved brother, Little Roo. Early on, she realises that her body is dangerous, and she and Roo are shipped off to live with their Seventh Day Adventist grandparents – something to do with a blue nightdress, and Marcia’s latest boyfriend. The power of sex, and the fear of it, are palpable. She writes: “I’m feeling dark red things and I don’t know why.” She feels “pitch grey”. “The Terrible” is a thing, never made explicit, that haunts her.
There are times when the weird typography is inspired: a conversation between Yrsa and Roo, perfectly in tune, which bats dialogue between opposite margins; the occasions when despair and entropy make neat black lines dissolve into chaos. At other times the stylistic tricks seem unnecessary. Some readers will be put off by the start-stop nature of this extraordinary narrative. Others will be thrilled by its honesty.
• The Terrible is published by Penguin. To order a copy for £8.49 (RRP £9.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
QUOTED: "Yrsa Daley-Ward’s story of her life and all the things that happened ... is a rare combination of literary brilliance, originality of voice and a narrative that commands you to keep going until you’ve reached the last page."
"Her poetry is moving and original. ... Her prose is invigorating, razor-sharp and moves at the speed of light. Yrsa Daley-Ward is an explosive new talent and this book should not be missed."
The Terrible by Yrsa Daley-Ward - review: a must-read memoir from an explosive new talent
Yrsa Daley-Ward’s account of her early life mixes poetry and prose to dazzling effect
ANNA VAN PRAAGH
Thursday 31 May 2018 11:28
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It's not often that a memoir of a young woman whom you know practically nothing immediately grips you and compels you to keep reading until
it’s finished. But Yrsa Daley-Ward’s story of her life and all the things that happened — “even the Terrible Things (and God there were Terrible Things)” — is a rare combination of literary brilliance, originality of voice and a narrative that commands you to keep going until you’ve reached the last page.
Daley-Ward’s 2014 self-published collection of poetry, Bone (since re-issued by Penguin), was one of those stealth hits that came out of nowhere. This paper called it “one of the must-reads of the year” while The Atlantic praised her “aching and touchable work that illuminates life’s interior emotional movements with nuance and long-lingering imagery”. It made her a literary sensation, an Instagram star and figurehead for the LGBT+ community.
This is her story of growing up in the North-West of England with her kind, exhausted mother Marcia, Marcia’s boyfriend Linford — “sometimes frightening sometimes fun” — and her little brother Roo, whom she adores. When Daley-Ward is seven, Marcia, who works nights at a hospital, becomes concerned that her daughter’s changing figure might attract unwanted attention from her boyfriend. “Remember, Linford is not your dad,” she says.
READ MORE
What She Ate by Laura Shapiro - review
And so she sends her — and later Roo — to live with her grandparents who are devout Seventh-Day Adventists. They spend the next four years living under their strict religious regime — they go to church all day every Saturday and they are banned from going anywhere ,except for school and church missions.
“Do you think that Mum doesn’t love us enough, and that’s why we have to live with Grandma and Granddad,” asks Roo one day.
“I think she loves us a bit, but not as much as other people’s mums.”
“Is it because we’re black? Granddad says that the world hates black people,” asks Roo.
Daley-Ward is of Jamaican and Nigerian heritage, but her school is “a sea of white” and casual racism is something she encounters frequently. When she and Roo go collecting for the church, a couple ask them where they are from in Africa and tell them their English is good and that they feel “so very sorry for the Third World and all of its problems. It’s because your leaders are corrupt. They just won’t govern themselves correctly. They want all the money and power for themselves and they don’t give a toss about you people. Shame.”
Yrsa-Daley-Ward-(c)-Nicole-Nodland.jpg
The return to her mother, when Daley-Ward is 11, is liberating. “At Mum’s, Little Roo and I could do what we wanted, so we did.” But there is a worrying lack of structure to their lives too, which is described kindly and without judgement.
Her mother’s boyfriends aren’t perfect “Meet Terence/Mum’s boyfriend/Who cheats on her but is otherwise fine”; “Meet David, mum’s new boyfriend/who steals money from her/and asks if you’ve done it with a boy yet”.
Daley-Ward embarks on a journey of terrible depressions and sometimes thrilling, sometimes sad, sexual awakenings. Later she moves to London where she starts modelling, doing sex work and gets heavily into drugs, while Roo also goes off the rails.
"One moving chapter, where Daley-Ward takes on the role of a dominatrix, is written as a scene in a play."
Anna Van Praagh
Daley-Ward writes with mastery, cantering over literary genres and styles. Some of the story is written in a combination of poetry and prose, alternating between the past and present tense. The chapters are sometimes numbered, sometimes given titles — “Truth”, “Wildlife”, “Physics and magic”.
One moving chapter, where Daley-Ward takes on the role of a dominatrix for an old-fashioned kindly man, is written in the form of a scene in a play. Her poetry is moving and original — “and I think about these parents of ours/our makers/our stars (such impossible, complex stars.)/How they came, exploded, and fell away. They are not ours, the stars/and never have been.”
The-Terrible-by-Yrsa-Daley-Ward..jpg
Her prose is invigorating, razor-sharp and moves at the speed of light. Yrsa Daley-Ward is an explosive new talent and this book should not be missed.
Yrsa Daley-Ward will be performing at 5x15 celebrating Black British women on 4 June; the Second Home Poetry Festival on June 5; and the British Library on June 6.
The Terrible by Yrsa Daley-Ward (Penguin, £9.99), buy it here.
QUOTED: "a hybrid of cryptic, spoken-word poetry and punchy prose."
The Terrible review: Yrsa Daley-Ward's struggles and the saving grace of poetry
By Fiona Capp
22 June 2018 — 12:15am
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The Terrible
Yrsa Daley-Ward
The Terrible. By Yrsa Daley-Ward.
The Terrible. By Yrsa Daley-Ward.
Photo: Supplied
Penguin, $22.99
What is "the terrible"? And how terrible is it? These questions pull the reader through this edgy memoir: a hybrid of cryptic, spoken-word poetry and punchy prose. Growing up in the north of England, Yrsa Daley-Ward shuttles between her strict Seventh Day Adventist grandparents and the chaotic world of her mother and her mother's dodgy boyfriends. One day, her mother abruptly announces that Daley-Ward's absent father – a Nigerian academic she has never known – is dead. In adolescence, black moods take hold of her; she becomes hooked on the power of sex, alcohol and drugs. Later, she signs up with a modelling agency and ends up working as an escort. "The terrible" becomes her constant companion until she walks into a bar where poetry is being read – a chance encounter that becomes the spark for the rough magic of this book.
QUOTED: "Despite the provenance of its author, “The Terrible” does not feel entirely Instapoetic. It is not minimalist. While the book itself can fit inside a large jacket pocket, the language is frequently incantatory, repetitive, or manic. Though her plainspokenness resembles Rupi Kaur’s accessibility, Daley-Ward has a specific story to tell, one that is suspenseful and affecting in its details, whereas Kaur aspires to universality, featurelessness."
"Daley-Ward is often intentionally funny, and reluctant to wallow in suffering or self-pity. She is less interested in inspiring readers or glamorizing herself than in voicing, with what can seem like sincere surprise, the contents of her mind."
Yrsa Daley-Ward Breaks Out of the Instapoetry Pack with Her Memoir “The Terrible”
By Katy WaldmanJune 13, 2018
Daley-Ward embodies select elements of Instagram poetry while skirting its worst hazards.Photograph by Mike Kobal
Has poetry taken over Instagram, or has Instagram taken over poetry? A coterie of creators, drawn to the image-sharing platform as a lyric technology, is helping poetry—or at least, Instapoetry—find a wider, more diverse audience. Their queen, Rupi Kaur, types spare, lowercase lines over stylized photographs. Her work, stark and minimalist, is nevertheless profuse when it comes to followers (2.7 million) and sales. (The collections “Milk and Honey” and “The Sun and Her Flowers” were New York Times best-sellers). Kaur, a Punjabi-Canadian in her twenties, is a catalyst for angst about a genre of verse that some view as trite, materialistic, soulless. “she was music,” Kaur writes, “but he had his ears cut off - rupi kaur.” Or: “we are all born / so beautiful / the greatest tragedy / is being convinced / we are not - rupi kaur.” On my phone, I have spirals of texts in which vapid thoughts or confessions are enjambed and then signed “- rupi kaur.” (This joke is also a parody Twitter meme: the Internet has impishly attributed such poems as “i shoved a whole / bag of jellybeans / up my ass” and “i wanted / chick-fil-a / but / you / were / a sunday morning” to “- rupi kaur.”) But writing in the Times, in December, Carl Wilson defended the directness and emotional honesty of the Instapoets. At best, he argued, their work carves out a pristine space for reflection—one not “entirely unlike the mental stillness and ‘othering’ fostered by poetry’s traditional techniques.”
Whatever you think of these artists (that they are engaged in radical self-discovery; that they sell banal faux-inspiration; that they empower young women and people of color; that they profane Apollo), their posts do share certain characteristics. These include brevity, a self-mythology that unforgiving critics will call narcissism, inclusiveness that often manifests as a lack of specificity, affirmation of readers’ emotions, and the thesis (more felt than reasoned through) that damage is beautiful and beauty damaging. (As a side note, there has to be a better way to lift up people with problems than to declare that problems are beautiful. Who cares if problems are beautiful? They’re problems!) One exception to this broad stereotype is Yrsa Daley-Ward, a British writer and model who embodies select elements of Instapoetry while skirting its worst hazards. (Her Instagram account has more than a hundred and thirty-five thousand followers.) Daley-Ward, of Jamaican and Nigerian ancestry, is the author of one book of poetry, “bone,” and one “lyrical memoir,” “The Terrible,” which is billed as “part prose, part verse.”
“The Terrible” sketches Ward’s childhood, in northwest England, and also her sexual coming of age, there and in South Africa. She and her brother, Little Roo, grew up with a single mother and her “half fun, half frightening” boyfriend. (He is readers’ first inkling of the “terrible”: the darkness that, because it happens to or around you, you believe you’ve conjured.) The children move in with their devout Christian grandparents—no fun, all frightening. It is not until they return home, four years later, that Daley-Ward fully grasps the apparent meaning of her body: “(1) a Hot-thing (2) a weapon of delicious and complete destruction (3) an almost-power.” She seduces, dates, and is exploited by older men; unable to find modelling work in her twenties (a booker explains that her “look might be too strong . . . it’s not easy for Black Girls”), she joins a strip club, and then an escort service. At the first, a guest assaults another performer in front of her. At the second, a client offers tea and small talk before shyly asking to play the schoolboy to her headmistress. While she is scornful of the predators soliciting lap dances, Daley-Ward describes her johns with detached compassion, like a doctor. Her bedside manner is brisk and kind, her boredom nonjudgmental. Meanwhile, she becomes depressed and begins experimenting with self-destruction: pills, anorexia, alcoholism.
Daley-Ward’s themes—addiction, mental illness, sexuality, body image, womanhood, self-expression—are familiar territory for Instapoetry. In addition, “The Terrible” has the experimental form and style one associates with verse more generally: there are invented words (“blackshining,” “powerfear,” “diediedie”), promiscuous italics and capitalizations, and irregular typefaces. Lines of text hover in fields of white space or are stacked into perfect rectangles. Daley-Ward prefers evocative fragments (“these parents of ours / our makers / our stars”) to complete sentences. Some chapters unfold as scenes in a play, replete with stage directions. (“YOU go the bathroom and struggle to peel this leather costume off your skin.”)
At worst, the nontraditional elements scan as crutches or distractions. But Daley-Ward’s giddy formatting evokes the blur of experience and sensuality she says that she is in thrall to, both as a one-time drug user and as an artist. She is extravagant, catholic with her techniques. Freely mixing first-, second-, and third-person narration, she creates an effect of plural selves, as if in conversation with Akwaeke Emezi, the Nigerian-born author of “Freshwater,” a novel told in the entwined mutterings of multiple spirits. Both works tap into strong undercurrents of magic. Daley-Ward finds unicorns in her garden; Little Roo “sees things” written in the sky. It is the subterranean glitter of mysticism in the narrator’s descriptions of her surroundings that lends them their occasional menace.
Despite the provenance of its author, “The Terrible” does not feel entirely Instapoetic. It is not minimalist. While the book itself can fit inside a large jacket pocket, the language is frequently incantatory, repetitive, or manic. Though her plainspokenness resembles Rupi Kaur’s accessibility, Daley-Ward has a specific story to tell, one that is suspenseful and affecting in its details, whereas Kaur aspires to universality, featurelessness. Daley-Ward is often intentionally funny, and reluctant to wallow in suffering or self-pity. She is less interested in inspiring readers or glamorizing herself than in voicing, with what can seem like sincere surprise, the contents of her mind. “It takes six moments to write a thing,” she muses. “You grip / your heart, involuntarily / and your soul comes up.” Her work, not (if we take her at her word) as intentional as the typical poet’s and produced with less effort, contains less artifice. This constitutes a welcome break from Instagram in general, not to mention Instapoetry. It suggests a praxis: “Your soul arises and you let it; or you don’t.”
Katy Waldman is a staff writer at The New Yorker.
QUOTED: "The collection is ultimately saved from being dark and obsessive. The poems are also full of light, and of strength, and of warmth. Sometimes, they are touching. It is also true, however, that they are not always easy to relate to, and that the repetitiveness of certain themes and moods might be heavy on people."
BOOK REVIEW: BONE BY YRSA DALEY-WARD
bone.jpg
BONE
by Yrsa Daley-Ward
AMAZON
GOODREADS
Several extracts from the poems of Yrsa Daley-Ward’s collection Bone have ended up in my diary and on the walls of my room. The collection is as raw and essential as the title suggests: no sentence is unnecessary; every line is charged. Whole poems are made up of sentences which could be considered aphorisms, but which lack their sarcasm or arrogance.
Yrsa Daley-Ward, born from Jamaican and Nigerian parents and raised in the north of England, hides nothing of herself and her story, and puts her hands in all the dark, visceral, and secret places of her life. She writes uncompromisingly about the most difficult themes: mental illness, sexual work and abuse, poverty, depression and hope, family, home, and love – especially love.
Although Bone is made up of many poems and several pieces of flash-fiction, the collection gave me the feeling of being more unitary, complete, and solid than its form may suggest; it almost felt like a novel, or a movie. Recurring images or themes set the mood and atmosphere of the whole collection, so that after a couple of pages the poems begin to feel familiar. For instance, a recurring image is that of small spaces, dark spaces, tight spaces, things which fold on themselves, which gasp for air, which need to escape.
But this is not everything. As much as the poems have a claustrophobic undertone, they are not dwelling into it or into drama for its own sake, and are ready to embrace the complexity of emotions and the most luminous parts of existence as well–again, especially love. The poems in which this was most manifest were my favorite ones. One of them is “not the end of the world, but almost,” with extracts like:
No hard feelings hard, bright world
but maybe
just maybe you are not for me. Maybe
I’m stretched too thinly, pressed too deeply into you in a shape that I
can’t keep without cramping and maybe
just maybe your breath is too cold. …
That was when I saw you.
…
Days when I want to kiss you but
your mouth is bitter and my thoughts
are bitter and I’m angry, just mad, just crazy with it all
but we are each others home sweet
home, Love.
The roof is screwed on too tight at
times and the walls of our house can pinch a little but, my God, they are
always warm.
The collection is ultimately saved from being dark and obsessive. The poems are also full of light, and of strength, and of warmth. Sometimes, they are touching. It is also true, however, that they are not always easy to relate to, and that the repetitiveness of certain themes and moods might be heavy on people who have no idea whatsoever what the author is talking about. For this reason, although I would say that this book is for many, it is not for all.
This collection will be released on 26 September, but you can preorder it now:
ORDER BONE
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ELISA SABBADIN
Did her BA in English Language and Culture in Groningen, and is currently doing her MA in English and American Modern Literature in Cork. Particularly interested in the Beats and in all sorts of poetry. Believes in travelling, practical art, daydreaming, and dark chocolate.
QUOTED: "It’s to Daley-Ward’s credit that what makes her writing shine in screenshots also makes it shine on the page. She has a knack for getting directly to a story’s heat-point, and once there, to distill the emotions within it."
"Most of bone’s work is structured in flowing prose blocks, or as spaced-out lines that drift down the white space of a page. But what the collection lacks in diversity of form, it makes up for in the layered ingenuity of its narratives."
"It honestly excavates a writer’s life, not simply presenting pain, but also showing an individual working through it."
Yrsa Daley-Ward’s Powerful, Poetic Distillations
Revisiting bone, a 2017 collection that showed the possibilities of poetry on the internet
HANIF ABDURRAQIB
DEC 31, 2017
Yrsa Daley-Ward
NICOLE NODLAND
Every so often, alarm bells get rung about the possibility that poetry is dead. These arguments usually get stuck in the grooves of what poetry should and shouldn’t do; whether its moment has passed; whether it has enough of a contemporary readership. Such critiques tend to miss the upside of poetry’s shifting entry points, which have made it, as a language, all the more readily accessible, and global. This change in access includes, of course, the internet and the way poets have figured out how to exist on it—particularly on social media sites, where their work can reach thousands of people with immediacy, without needing to be accepted to a journal or undergo a waiting period before publication.
Yrsa Daley-Ward is, in a sense, one of these poets. Born in England to Jamaican and Nigerian parents, she creates aching and touchable work that illuminates life’s interior emotional movements with nuance and long-lingering imagery. She’s also among those—like Rupi Kaur and R.M. Drake—who have figured out how to use Instagram to their advantage. (I hesitate to use the term Instagram poet, as it has become a dismissive way to address practitioners who use the platform to extend their reach.) Daley-Ward’s debut collection, bone, was first self-published in 2014 and rereleased this fall, with additional poems and an elegant introductory essay from the essayist Kiese Laymon.
In his foreword, Laymon hits on one of the reasons bone resonated for me this year: Poetry isn’t always easily punctured, or made sense of, and there is a particular beauty to the moments when it can be. Laymon describes not understanding, as an 11-year-old, the poems in the the Book of Psalms, or who they were meant to be speaking to. He writes about the moment he did discover poetry (“I’d been given poetry at 16 when all I could think to do was steal all the wheat bread, white bread, cinnamon rolls, pitas, and hot dog buns from the bread truck after the Rodney King verdict”) and praises Daley-Ward in turn for knowing how to give poetry—and in the process, herself—to the reader.
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Part of the way Daley-Ward does this is through her Instagram account, with its more than 120,000 followers. Her main means of engagement is language, some of it uplifting (a screencap of a tweet from June reads, “don’t be fooled, the world is still gorgeous”) and some of it brutal (a photo of the end of the poem “This Was the Story” reads, “When I came back, our house was gone. Sometimes exactly what you want not to happen happens anyway”). Using a platform without bowing to it is something many young poets are grappling with; it takes skill to do this and remain true to the work. It’s to Daley-Ward’s credit that what makes her writing shine in screenshots also makes it shine on the page. She has a knack for getting directly to a story’s heat-point, and once there, to distill the emotions within it down to a line or two. This plays well on the internet, but even better—and perhaps more surprisingly—in the fuller context of bone.
Take the sprawling “It Is What It Is,” which—like most of the poems in the collection—is written as a single narrative, broken into sections, over 10 or so pages. The piece centers on the poet’s childhood and parents and reads like a much shorter poem than it is, largely because of what seems to be Daley-Ward’s superpower: her ability to cluster powerful lines into wide pockets of story that make for sharp and unexpected moments. “I am tired all of the time lately, but am not sleeping. When I do, I have strange dreams in which neither of my parents are dead,” she writes at the outset of one section, lighting on an eerily relatable image.
Most of bone’s work is structured in flowing prose blocks, or as spaced-out lines that drift down the white space of a page. But what the collection lacks in diversity of form, it makes up for in the layered ingenuity of its narratives. While “It Is What It Is” straddles the line between short story and prose poem, “Some Kind Of Man” decidedly takes on the mantle of the short story: Its 17 pages are full of dialogue and winding, precise imagery around the dissolution of a relationship and a friendship between two characters, Samuel and Benny. With Samuel, Daley-Ward lushly paints a grating character who feels worth rooting for anyway. Just after a scene in which he is caught cheating on his partner with another woman, Daley-Ward adds: “He was the kind of man who, when you woke up in the middle of the night itching on the joints of your fingers and your legs and jaw line because the mosquitoes had been at you again, would rub cold ointment into your skin.” His goodness, the poet suggests, overlaps with his badness; the two are inextricable from each other.
Ultimately, though, the book is about Daley-Ward, in that it honestly excavates a writer’s life, not simply presenting pain, but also showing an individual working through it. The poem “Lipsing,” for example, is a simple, yet expansive nugget about how narratives get formed: “Some lovers look you in the mouth / Right clean in your mouth / And your story comes, / Running.” In its final pages, bone takes on a triumphant, if weary, tone, with a last poem called “Dankyes (Mwaghavul),” which suggests, in the name of this impressive debut, both an end and a beginning:
Today is the first day
Of the rest of it.
Of course there will be other
First days
But none exactly like this.