I Hope This Helps (Paperback)

Samiya Bashir

ISBN 10: 1643622722 / ISBN 13: 9781643622729

Published by Nightboat Books, New York, 2025

About this Item

Paperback. 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 Helpsreflects 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. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Seller Inventory # 9781643622729

Bibliographic Details

• Title: I Hope This Helps (Paperback)
• Publisher: Nightboat Books, New York
• Publication Date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1643622722
• ISBN 13: 9781643622729
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: new

About this title

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.

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.