I Hope This Helps

Bashir (Field Theories) 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.

[I Hope This Helps] combines poetry, essays, art, photography, I mean every page is a surprise visually and I really love that.

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.

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.

It’s hard not to be floored by I Hope This Helps by Samiya Bashir. The pieces in this collection come at us from unexpected directions and sneak up in stealth mode.

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.

“The language is genre-bending. . . making critical theory out of dream visions.”

Each of Samiya Bashir’s pieces combine to create a whole which, together, convey a richly quilted experience that helps the reader feel closer to being understood, closer to feeling part of something bigger than themselves.

Both within and extending beyond traditional academic settings, Bashir’s work creates, employs, and teaches a restorative poetics, turning her moments of painful experience into triumphs of witness, healing, and change.

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.