Field Theories - by Samiya Bashir (Paperback)

About the Book

In her third collection, Bashir (Gospel) displays an intriguingly multivalent approach to the objectivities and subjectivities of black experience reflected in her multimedia collaborations

Book Synopsis

Field Theories wends its way through quantum mechanics, chicken wings, Newports, and love, melding blackbody theory (idealized perfect absorption vs. the whitebody's idealized reflection) with live Black bodies. Woven through experimental lyrics is a heroic crown of sonnets that wonders about love, intent, identity, hybridity, and how we embody these interstices. Albert Murray said, "The second law of thermodynamics ain't nothin' but the blues." So what is the blue of how we treat each other, ourselves, and the world, and of how the world treats us?

Review Quotes

"Field Theories masterminds the "neverhush," and each poem makes a spectacular event of artful speech that dances on the ridgeline of this brilliant poets' history, heart, and intellect. And while she cuts to the quick, all swift-witted and informed, what I admire most is Bashir's dexterous language, how she aligns our bodies to a vernacular sense of ourselves, knowing that the world is more than empty signs and algorithms, and that we need to ever engineer the widest possible love the world has ever seen."--Major Jackson "Publishers Weekly" (1/1/2017 12:00:00 AM)

"In her third collection, Bashir (Gospel) displays an intriguingly multivalent approach to the objectivities and subjectivities of black experience reflected in her multimedia collaborations. A series of recurring "coronagraphs" become a tunnel through which the figures of John Henry and his wife Polly Ann speak, forming a sonnet crown that brings new life to an American myth...Bashir's experimental visual gestures, such as a bullet-hole riddled prose poem on the law of probability, resonate as bluesy meditations on cosmic entropy's presence in the irreversible occurrences of American lives. ...Whether depicting the faces of marginalized citizens at late-night truck stops or cross-sectioning "bloodstreaks through musculoskeletal structure," Bashir positions the slings and arrows of black American life as both empirically observable and available for radical, and movingly layered, interpretations."-- "Publishers Weekly" (1/1/2017 12:00:00 AM)

"Samiya Bashir's Field Theories is science as only poetry can be. She's done her research and now she rethinks everything she gets her pen on: the relationship of dark matter to the sun, the possibilities of the heroic crown of sonnets, Keatsian aesthetics, social re- and inter-actions, and language itself. These poems are alive, are woman-truth, are burning darkly. Grab your shades. No: fire up your magnetosphere. This book is "black body radiation," and you can't handle it - but you've got to."--Evie Shockley "Publishers Weekly" (1/1/2017 12:00:00 AM)

"There are pecks here, as units of measure for hidden sweetness. And dag! Dag is here, scatted at Detroit depth. Field Theories is flush with blue notes, swung in the exercise and exorcism of blue devils, the off minor, off spherical acoustics of "baby we won" and "not the father" are folded into the gravity of a unified feel, the beauty and violence of inseparable differences, some impossible someone's arms. Our tongues are in the pitch black mouth she conjures and records. This is our music."--Fred Moten "Publishers Weekly" (1/1/2017 12:00:00 AM)

About the Author

SAMIYA BASHIR's previous books include Gospel, Where the Apple Falls, and Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social & Political Black Literature & Art. She lives in Portland, Oregon.