I Hope This Helps - by Samiya Bashir (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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 Helps reflects 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.

Review Quotes

"[I Hope This Helps] builds a portal . . . the collaborators and collaboration itself are everything. It wrecked me."
--Douglas Kearney, BOMB

"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

"Bashir presents a multimedia experience that captures the fractured contemporary moment in dynamic poems of wit, clarity, rage, and sorrow. . . This stirring volume deserves a wide audience."
--Publishers Weekly

"[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

"Just flipping through the pages of this book makes my brain light up, because no two pages look alike--or sound alike, based on what I heard at Bashir's recent book launch. Give me that variety, that playfulness, and also the intention behind this work: to help us navigate these trying times."
--Evie Shockley, Academy of American Poets Newsletter

"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 is experimental writing in the best sense. Bashir bends form as if physics doesn't apply to poetry. . . She insists, "I'm not saying I'm a prophet," but after devouring her heavenly dream-song of a book, the rest of us might name her one instead."
--Erin Vachon, The Rumpus

"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
"Moving through references to abusers, masks and darkness, Ezra Pound and apology, musical scores, cartography, the Library at Alexandria, accusation, sadness, woodcut images and memoir, this collection is masterful, propulsive in its urgency and in its agency, writing out survival across multiple forms and genres."--rob mclennan

About the Author

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.