Sit. :: Sleepless :: Drop :: Conjure. :: Fly.:: Large. Large. (secret)Yes. Question yourself. Question all thosewho meet you. Doubt. You weregiven birth to by notions formulated in heads. You werenot a child. Breathing just like anybody else.Exist. Think. Yes that’s the word. That is not theheavens. Unless there are. Unless.When your uncle speaks. On your behalf. Wonder.Of friends. (creatures of fiction) Whose likesand dislikes. Are a blood relation. Leapto the tongue. prodigiousimagination. Ceased to exist as beings. Journeys to a region. Solid andprominent. The way blind people’s eyes tend to. Numb of soul. Youare not yourself. Anyway. Numerous doorways.Are enabled. Through forests. Without anyclearing. Stone steps too numerous to count. In the wakeof the old man. There was a girl. A butcher.Knowing what knives of destiny await.
Maps I :: a cartography in progress
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“Maps I :: A Cartography in Progress” From I HOPE THIS HELPS: by Samiya Bashir.
Published by Nightboat Books on May 13, 2025.
Copyright © 2025 by Samiya Bashir.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Samiya Bashir—called “a dynamic, shape-shifting machine of perpetual motion” by Booklist’s Diego Báez—is a poet, librettist, performer, and multimedia artist. She is the author of four poetry collections, including Field Theories (Oregon Book Award and Pushcart Prize winner), and I Hope This Helps (Nightboat, 2025). A recipient of the Rome Prize, and most recently the June Jordan Visiting Scholar at Columbia University, Bashir is currently the Helen Zell Visiting Professor in Poetry at the University of Michigan and excited to lead Cave Canem’s NYC Fall Poetry Writing Workshop “Poem for Deep Thinkers,” in conversation with Rashid Johnson’s current Guggenheim exhibition which in turn is in conversation with Amiri Baraka’s poem all of the same name. This week, she’s leading a groundbreaking workshop on Multimedia Poetries at the Fine Arts Work Center Summer Program. When not on the road, she lives in Harlem.
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.
PRAISE
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
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