Somebody Give This Heart a Pen

by Sophia Thakur

Overview

In a powerful debut, rising star Sophia Thakur brings her spoken word performance to the page.

Be with yourself for a moment.
Be yourself for a moment.
Airplane mode everything but yourself for a moment.

From acclaimed performance poet Sophia Thakur comes a stirring collection of coming-of-age poems exploring issues of identity, difference, perseverance, relationships, fear, loss, and joy. From youth to school to family life to falling in love and falling back out again—the poems draw on the author’s experience as a young mixed-race woman trying to make sense of a lonely and complicated world. With a strong narrative voice and emotional empathy, this is poetry that will resonate with all young people, whatever their background and whatever their dreams.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781536222968
Publisher:	Candlewick Press
Publication date:	09/14/2021
Pages:	112
Sales rank:	1,079,298
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.40(d)
Lexile:	940L (what's this?)
Age Range:	14 - 17 Years

About the Author

Sophia Thakur has been performing since the age of sixteen and has a wide reach across social media. She has presented two TED Talks and has worked closely with young people, sharing her poems and the creative process. This is her first published collection. She lives in Middlesex, England.

Read an Excerpt

. . . the process
Before place, before time.
Before God separated the water from the skies.
Before factories, before machines, before money, before screens.
Before the internet, before iPhones. Before you and before me.
It was vacant.
And from this empty all there was to do was grow.
And so we did. And then we waited.
We waited to see how things would unfold.
We listened to how many stories were told.
We watched and saw how things could flow,
how they could change and they could burn.
How things got better while things got worse.
So we began to pray and we learned to break.
 
We broke to let the light in. Broke to let it out.
Broke and waited for the right thing to fill tired skins out.
We broke to break and broke to heal. Broke to feel alive and broke to just feel. Broke to humble and we broke to build.
Broke to take. Broke to give. Broke to forget and broke to fix.
From fixing we learned and from learning came life.
Came reasons to go and more reasons to try.
But more than that, from breaking we know that though we shed, we can always regrow.
Always reseed.
Always restart.
This is the natural process of a heart.
 
This book mirrors the process.
The building, the breaking, the learning and recreating.
Your skin turns inside out.
Each limb becomes a heart.
Bloody body parts across plain paper.
Find some Is to dot and Ts to cross until the mess resembles poetry.
Read yourself between pages.
Learn to speak heart.


sugarcane is sweetest at its joint
if a child washes his hands, he may eat with kings it takes a village to raise a child wood already touched by f ire is not hard to set alight a wise man who knows proverbs can reconcile all difficulties it is better to walk than curse the road medicine left in the bottle can’t help laugh at the end an axe does not cut down a tree by itself
GROW
if you can walk, you can dance; 
if you can talk, you can sing no one can uproot the tree which God has planted where you will sit when you are old shows where you stood in youth when you stand with the blessings of your mother and God, it matters not who stands against you
dube    ñinilaa ni    fitiroo benta
the searcher for the shade will make the dusk other people’s wisdom prevents the king from being called a fool rising early makes the road short around a flowering tree there are many insects


Somebody Give This Heart a Pen
Try it all at home.
Try it at school
At university
In the office
On the corner of the street that your father lives on,
you never visit.
Beneath your lover’s window next to the years you left there.
In the shower to your song
Inside the rain
Under the sun
Inside the night
Between the days
 
Try to find space to hear what your heart says
Make it your best friend
Slow down and clock back into yourself
 
Give your heart a pen.


Picking a Name
Ignore those scared by your potential
Those who snigger while you figure your path
Ignore when they try to bring out the past in you
What matters is not what you are called
But what you answer to.


Rise to You
With every tomorrow and next time and one day and soon come the sun grows tired of our waiting,
our excuses and entitled patience,
our confidence in the second chance that forever holds us from taking one.
 
What if one day the night never comes and the sun holds the sky hostage and acted-upon aspirations are the price to pay for night to ever come again?
How many twenty-fours would it take to give action to these ideas?
 
Pump action into you whether it’s making that call or making that plan the sun shines brightest on those who stand.

Editorial Reviews

10/19/2020

In her debut poetry collection, Thakur explores love, family, and the challenges and joys of being a Black woman in contemporary Britain. An opening poem describes the regenerative process of the heart (“the building, the breaking, the learning and recreating”), which Thakur likens to creating a book. The remaining pages explore those concepts in poems divided into four steps: grow, wait, break, and grow again. Thakur delves into the intimacies of romantic love, through the first moments of intrigue (“I’m so certain light lives behind your lips”) to the devastation of a relationship’s collapse: “I wake, flooded in a dream of you.” Though some of the poems lean on broad, familiar metaphors, Thakur embraces that connective power, welcoming readers to see themselves in the emotions her narrator expresses. The collection is most powerful in its odes to Black girlhood: “Little black girl, my heart thrives in the stride of your halo.” Offering particular nourishment for young Black women, this raw, heartfelt collection will resonate with all readers seeking a lyrical meditation on the journey to heal from heartache. Ages 14–up. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

In this debut collection first published in the UK, performance poet Thakur explores identity, family, loss, relationships, vulnerability, empowerment, and self-discovery. At once intimate and universal, aching and affirming, the poems examine the cycles of breaking, healing, and growth that shape people through young adulthood and beyond...An affecting poetry collection for all teens that deserves a spot in school and public libraries.
—School Library Journal (starred review)

The torrent of Thakur’s spoken word poetry storms the page to flow, feed, and flood in this thunderous debut with broad reader appeal. Thakur, who is of Indian, Sri Lankan, and Gambian descent, offers a love letter to Black and brown readers that offers, at once, the intimacy of the self exposed and the universal power of story shared. A deluge of verse to dance in.
—Kirkus Reviews

This poetry collection, broken into five sections, mirrors generally the process of personal growth: grow, wait, break, and grow again. Woven into the collection are affirmations of Black girlhood, coping with breakups, reflecting on past hurt, and growing from old mistakes...It is this exploration that will resonate with teen readers who search for stanzas to narrate the intensity of their lives, and offer reprieve when it feels there is none.
—Booklist

In her debut poetry collection, Thakur explores love, family, and the challenges and joys of being a Black woman in contemporary Britain...The collection is most powerful in its odes to Black girlhood: “Little black girl, my heart thrives in the stride of your halo.” Offering particular nourishment for young Black women, this raw, heartfelt collection will resonate with all readers seeking a lyrical meditation on the journey to heal from heartache.
—Publishers Weekly Online

From the Publisher

★ 08/01/2020

Gr 9 Up—In this debut collection first published in the UK, performance poet Thakur explores identity, family, loss, relationships, vulnerability, empowerment, and self-discovery. At once intimate and universal, aching and affirming, the poems examine the cycles of breaking, healing, and growth that shape people through young adulthood and beyond. The poems vary in length from a few lines to a few pages, and they beg to be read aloud even as they invite introspection. In several poems, Thakur directly addresses the reader. Throughout the collection, she revisits themes that many young adults will find relevant and familiar, including the closeness and distance of family, the evolution of relationships, what it means to know one another, the ways in which life can both soften and sharpen people, and finding oneself in moments of stillness. In one poem, Thakur extends an invitation: "When you're not feeling your world, / come into mine." Readers will almost certainly want to, time and again. VERDICT An affecting poetry collection for all teens that deserves a spot in school and public libraries.—Lauren Strohecker, McKinley Elem. Sch., Elkins Park, PA

School Library Journal

2020-06-30
British performance artist Thakur reflects on coming-of-age and coming into one’s own.

Beginning quietly, a prologue of sorts describes the process of a heart—to grow, to wait, to break, to grow again—stages echoed by the sections of the book. In “Grow,” free-form poems are a deep breath in, calling for introspection, expansion, and loving recognition of self: “Pull your voice from your toes up / Let it grab and hold onto your fear / Open your mouth and drag it out.” In “Wait,” that breath is held, exploring the struggle for survival, the hush of uncertainty, and the painful onset of love: “Do you listen to the mind or the heart / to get the right thing done?” The exhale that comes in “Break” is the one that follows a swift fist; an overflow of exhausted stanzas and pained lines rush in relief from broken barriers of doubt and self-effacement: “Be with yourself for a moment. / Be yourself for a moment.” And at last, in “Grow Again” comes a new breath, new steps forward: “When the world denies you / Find your power / And write.” The torrent of Thakur’s spoken word poetry storms the page to flow, feed, and flood in this thunderous debut with broad reader appeal. Thakur, who is of Indian, Sri Lankan, and Gambian descent, offers a love letter to Black and brown readers that offers, at once, the intimacy of the self exposed and the universal power of story shared.

A deluge of verse to dance in. (Poetry. 14-adult)

Kirkus Reviews