Home, belonging, feeling dislocated – all of those themes come up in your work. I know you experienced homelessness as a child. How did that affect you?

Have you watched Inception? It felt like that: homelessness within homelessness within homelessness. I felt unmoored in such a big way, completely ungrounded. I always knew that Somalia wasn’t going to be an option because it’s been in turmoil my whole existence. So we made home here, but then suddenly we’re being evacuated out with police assistance and the neighbours are watching and I’m a child trying to figure out what the fuck is going on and where we’re going to live now. Being homeless really does make you feel, as a child, definitely worthless. It was something I wanted to hide; I didn’t want people to know. You feel like the dregs of humanity – even though that’s not how it really is, that’s how you feel.

My mum felt a big sense of failure and shame around it. It was right after she had gotten a divorce so she felt like it was very much on her that this had happened, when in fact, she was doing her best and she was so young – she had me when she was 18.

It sounds like you have a lot of compassion for your mum – has that grown over time?

I’ve always had it but it’s the strongest it’s ever been now. Whenever I write about it, I come back to the fact that her childhood was like a horror film. I always have that in the back of my head.

Mother-daughter relationships are usually so unrealistic – people aren’t honest about it. It’s all ‘I love you, Mum. Thank you for giving birth to me,’ but we pick up a lot of our weird bullshit from our parents. I’m obsessed with my mum but it’s one of the most complex relationships I have in my life – it’s also my earliest feeling of almost unrequited love. I know I have my mother’s love, but if it feels like you don’t, it can set you up for a lot of bullshit.

Your poems are full of references from TV, music and film – from Crimewatch to Grace Jones and Dawson’s Creek. It feels like they’re written in the throes of real life.

Yeah, I write while life is happening. People will be talking, and I’m like, hold on, I’ve got to write that down. Then I’ll go back and flesh it out.

I write every day – on my laptop or on my phone, or just notes. I do a lot of writing to film and music and that’s why Lemonade was so great – I felt like I’d been training for that my whole life. Today I’ve been writing to a song called Both Sides Of The Moon by Celeste. And when I go up to my hotel room later, I’ll put on that song and it’ll take me back to where I was…

Bless The Daughter Raised By A Voice In Her Head is published by Chatto & Windus in collaboration with Flipped Eye, £12.99

Warsan will be appearing at the Women of the World Festival on 12 March and the Manchester Literary Festival on 14 March

Superstar poet Warsan Shire on trauma-bonding, therapy and why working with Beyoncé has made her stronger