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parsed(2025-05-23) - pubdate: 04/25
turn:
pub date: 1747976400
today: 1739253600, pubdate > today = true

nyp: 1;

I Hope This Helps

May 23, 2025 | Trade paperback
ISBN: 9781643622729
$28.95
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This title will be released on May 23, 2025. Pre-order now.

Description

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.

About this 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.

ISBN: 9781643622729
Format: Trade paperback
Pages: 144
Publisher: Nightboat Books
Published: 2025-05-23

Reviews

"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

"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

 "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

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