Beyoncé’s new visual album, Lemonade, which premiered on HBO on April 23, has people talking about British-Somali poet Warsan Shire, whose spoken word poetry serves as interludes between the songs.

Shire, a twenty-seven-year-old writer born in Kenya to Somali parents and raised in London, has published two chapbooks, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth (2011) and Her Blue Body (2015); her first full poetry collection, Extreme Girlhood, will be released sometime in the fall of 2016, according to the New York Times.

“I don’t know when love became elusive. What I know is: no one I know has it,” Beyoncé says in a voice-over in the video, which is derived from Shire’s previously published poem, “the unbearable weight of staying—(the end of the relationship).”

Yosra El-Essawy, a friend of Shire’s and Beyoncé’s official tour photographer, served as an early link between the poet and the singer before El-Essawy passed of cancer in 2014.

“yosra i hope you’re proud of us,” Shire wrote on Twitter last week, with a link to the album.

The wild success of Lemonade has generated discussion about the strong ties between music and poetry.

Bridget Minamore in Pitchfork writes, “There is a long tradition of people blurring the lines, with spoken word a sort of middle ground that shifts between them both,” referring to the 1970s spoken word scene where the “Last Poets navigated this unsteady ground with ease.”

“This blunt, overtly political personality has been the standard for spoken word ever since. The grey space between poetry and music is seen, essentially, as deep, and lends a sort of weight to the rest of your music. . . . poetry in music also often just sounds good. . . . Like Shire’s writing on Lemonade, poetry tied with music is often protest and sermon, a cry for help but also a call to arms, all rolled into one.”

In addition to being named the first Young Poet Laureate of London in 2014, Shire won the Brunel University African Poetry Prize in 2013, judged by Kwame Dawes, who called the decision “easy.”

Watch the album on Tidal.

Photo Credit: Amaal Said.