Eight years after Field Theories—Samiya Bashir’s third book, which won the Oregon Book Award for Poetry—comes I Hope This Helps, out now from Nightboat. Bashir’s work, both individual and collaborative, has been published, printed, and performed across the U.S. and abroad—and appears here in a culmination of her multimedia practice.
In our conversation below, Bashir discusses the project’s origins (personal and political rupture), its life as a “poetic mixtape,” and her many modes—all attuned to the compounded crises of our present.
“This book cracked something open in me,” she says. “I’m not trying to close it. I’m trying to live inside it—and see what grows.”
—Dante Silva
Dante Silva: Where, and how, did you start I Hope This Helps?
Samiya Bashir: This project first came to focus in the midst of rupture—not the poetic kind, but the real kind. Political rupture. Ecological. Existential. Personal.
As winter wound down in early 2020, the first installation of I Hope This Helps was exhibited as part of a group show in Rome. The show was up for two weeks before the pandemic shut-downs began in Italy. Within a month, as the pandemic started to spin out, I was being evacuated mid-residency from the American Academy in Rome. I left mid-dream. Mid-sentence. Mid-everything. I was disoriented. Unmoored. The world had gone quiet and terrifying and also filled with a kind of unprecedented potential that we seemed to globally just kind of turn our backs on.
The poems didn’t come clear at first. The breath did—or, really, the fight for it. I had to find a way to make space for grief, for uncertainty, for memory, and still survive. That’s where the work began to arise: not just on the page, but in the body, in the breath, in the hush that followed everything we thought we knew.
I scribbled out notes nonstop while quarantining with family in Truro. I thought I was just writing fragments. Turns out, I was completing a score.
Dante Silva: In “Per Aspera,” you write, “We ain’t all well.” That line feels like both confession and incantation. How does it set the tone for the book?
Samiya Bashir: It sets the terms. That line isn’t a metaphor or a flourish. It’s observation. It’s true. And I don’t believe in lying to the reader. We ain’t all well. We never have been. But we also seem to be moving away from, rather than toward, wellness. Quickly, painfully, and without real address. The idea that there’s some neat, collective “we” that’s arrived, that’s whole, that’s safe—it’s fiction. But we’re here. We’re trying. And we need language that acknowledges that.
“We ain’t all well” isn’t a dead-end; it’s an opening. It’s the start of reckoning, of recognition. It says: you’re not imagining it. You’re not alone in it. And no, there is no neat solution coming. But I’ll sit beside you while we name the wound. While we realize that we are, in fact, the solution but also that we each have different capacities. That’s where the title comes in too—I Hope This Helps. It’s not a cure. It’s a gesture. Tender. Tired. Trying. It’s what I have to offer.
Dante Silva: I Hope This Helps is physical, visual, auditory, spatial, theoretical. The forms span traditional verse, typography, and experimental prose (Derrais Carter describes your work as that of a “poet-cartographer”). How does your work as an art-maker, across mediums, affect your poetic practice?
Samiya Bashir: I don’t really separate them. It is my poetic practice. I’m not a poet who occasionally installs things, or an artist who sometimes writes. Everything I make comes from the same source—it’s just about what container it asks for. Some poems need to be walked through. Some need to be sung. Some need to scream through silence. When Derrais called me a “poet-cartographer,” I felt seen. I map. I mark. I score. I build. The spatial logic is always there—on the page, on the wall, in the breath. I’m constantly chasing resonance, and sometimes that resonance lives in materiality: fabric, sound, red acrylic, wind. Sometimes it is best delivered in black ink on white paper. I try not to decide too early.
Dante Silva: The project is collaborative, choral. Could you speak to the process of collaboration and citation?
Samiya Bashir: Everything I make is in conversation—with what came before, with what’s been silenced, with the people I come from and the ones I’m writing toward. My poetics is a choral form. It’s never just one voice—no matter how solo it sounds. Even when it’s solo on the surface, it’s echoing. It’s haunted. It’s harmonizing. I’m quoting, I’m sampling, I’m naming the names. My collaborators include composers, performers, designers—but also ancestors, memories, books, mistakes, fragments, ghosts. Sometimes I’m quoting outright. Sometimes I’m just listening hard enough to hear what’s already there and giving it room. I don’t make work that pretends to exist in isolation. That’s not how I was raised. That’s not how I’ve survived. This book contains many voices because that’s the only way I know how to tell the truth.
Dante Silva: I Hope This Helps is comprehensive, though it doesn’t suggest that it’s complete (I see these poems as part of a continuum that’s at once personal and cosmic). What’s coming next?
Samiya Bashir: The work continues. Golden Jubilee, the opera I’ve been writing, is the next major score—a full-length tragic opera rooted in Black postwar migration, labor, and haunted futurity in 1946 Detroit. It’s big. It’s visual, sonic, layered with ritual and refusal—but also tender. It holds the silences, too.
At the same time, I’m drawn toward smaller, quieter forms. I’m writing essays that breathe like poems. And I’m deep in The Layla & Noori Stories, a chapter book series for young readers that weaves Somali diasporic memory, Black girlhood, and everyday ancestral magic. That project holds everything that helped me find and understand possibility as a child: love, wonder, family, grief, joy, and stories that remember us and help teach us to remember ourselves.
This book cracked something open in me. I’m not trying to close it. I’m trying to live inside it—and see what grows.