Overview

Bending genre as a planetary body might bend spacetime, Bashir's poems live as music and film, as memoir, observation, and critique, as movement across both cosmic and poetic fields. I Hope This Helpsreflects on the excruciating metamorphosis of an artist, ""a twinkle-textured disco-ball Jenga set"" constrained and shaped by the limits of our reality: time, money, work, not to mention compounding global crises. Think of a river constrained by levees, a bonsai clipped and bent, a human body bursting through shapewear. Begging the question, what can it mean to thrive in the world as it is, Bashir says, ""Rats thrive in sewers so / maybe I'm thriving."" In these moving, sometimes harrowing meditations, Bashir reveals her vulnerable inner life, how she has built herself brick by brick into an artist.

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9781643622729

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Reviews

“In a voice stamped with her definitive, soul-drenched signature, Samiya Bashir blesses us with a roadmap for the living of our fractured and uprooted lives, forcing us to take an unflinching look at faith and the way it’s defined. This is a grandmama-braiding-the-hair book, a rev-ripping-up-the-pulpit book, a book you'll constantly come back to for both beauty and guidance.” –Patricia Smith, in praise of Gospel “Samiya Bashir’s poems have a terrific edginess. Reclaim, notice, and repair through the exigencies poetry may present. That’s a theory. Be an alchemist of the quotidian and you will survive. Another theory. Quantum mechanics get ready. It is a trembling vital field this poet is traveling in.” –Anne Waldman, in praise of Field Theories

""I Hope This Helps—a title I wish I thought of—is a formal field day of genre-bending innovation. This book is Bashir’s magnum opus."" —Jericho Brown ""[I Hope This Helps] combines poetry, essays, art, photography, I mean every page is a surprise visually and I really love that."" —Saeed Jones, Vibe Check Podcast ""Samiya Bashir’s I Hope This Helps is exuberant, choreographed cartography, improvisational typography, each page carrying the prints of a real human being/s, collaborative, lost-and-found, ekphrasis until it must bleed into real linotype. I read Samiya Bashir and it registers—something has been created. Something has been created titled I Hope This Helps.This reader’s answer: It does."" —Diane Seuss “I Hope this Helps presents readers with a kind of Samiya-Bashirian Ode, teeming with lucid music, candid witness and radical play. These poems blend levity and gravity, joy and sadness; they meld genres of memoir, essay and art. The Bashirian Ode is a testament of inner and outer empathy: the ways we study and care for ourselves and others. I Hope This Helps is akin to an illustrated, illuminated guidebook, a lantern of language for surviving dark times.”  —Terrance Hayes ""A thrilling fourth collection . . . With active experiments in time, font, and voice, Bashir assuredly takes on geography as a function and proves that the poet never stops moving, gifting confidences and realities in that process."" —Poetry Northwest ""What do we do to live and thrive—as Black people, joyous and queer, new neighbors and strangers, our full humanity—dwarfed in the shadows by towers of power, distraction, and fear? Bashir’s poetry leans into these questions using her superpower—pausing to listen—over-hearing and hearing over—“hearing” under and re-writing, reinscribing her Journey—through the “twinkle textured disco ball Jenga set”—and shows the reader how creative power fuels us to begin again. And again."" —Erica Hunt

Author Information

Samiya Bashir is a poet, performer, and multimedia artist whose work, both solo and collaborative, has been widely published, performed, installed, printed, screened, and experienced internationally. Bashir is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Field Theories, winner of the 2018 Oregon Book Award's Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry. Samiya's honors include the Rome Prize in Literature, the Pushcart Prize, Oregon's Arts & Culture Council Individual Artist Fellowship in Literature, plus numerous other awards, grants, fellowships, and residencies including MacDowell, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and the New York Council on the Arts. She lives in Harlem.

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