Samiya Bashir, I Hope This Helps

 

I’m the eldest child of an eldest child. I spent most of my little years surrounded by grown-ups who talked about grown-up things and lived their grown-up lives all while I — silent and usually unseen — watched, listened. Strong sense memory stories include an embrace of quiet invisibility and its helpmate: piping up to go along for the ride. I’d slip across a back seat and disappear into overhearing.

To grow up was to know all the ways to catch snatches of things that I wasn’t supposed to know yet. (“OVERHEARD”)

I’m really struck by “poet, writer, librettist, performer, and multi-media poetry maker” Samiya Bashir’s I Hope This Helps (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2025), a dynamic and expansive book-length polyvocality of and around resistance, memory, literature and utterance. “listen: // we ain’t all well,” begins the poem “PER ASPERA,” a poem that helps open the collection, “this world / spins designs / which madden / us shape us / like dough / bake us crisp [.]” Bashir is very much a poet who works in sentences that build upon each other towards a particular sequence of narrative truths or surrounding theses or comprehensions in a propulsive and self-aware syntax. As the poem “I DON’T KNOW, DO I?” begins: “So I wake up to news that they took Sid to the Düsseldorf emergy room in the middle of the night. / I’m not being honest about something. It only took two sentences to lie.” These poems are powerful, attempting a self-aware honesty, as well as the difficulties of attempting such openness, working on how things might improve, how the self might improve, and just how necessary both are required for the sake of the other. As the extended poem “OVERHEARD” continues: “Thing is: / structures aren’t forever, / needn’t be — for me, at least — shouldn’t be.” Or, two pages further: “I don’t usually write very well either. But the Muse Industrial Complex makes certain guarantees. The more I write, the more some things make sense — even if only to me; and if I’m honest, most of the world seems completely senseless, even if only to me.”

There is something to her text that offers, also, an echo to the structural counterpoint of Susan Howe collections [the most recent collection I reviewed was Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives (Christine Burgin Books/New Directions Books, 2014), although there are rumours of a new title this fall]—providing that opening prose essay blending research and memoir against counterpoint of poems set as phrase-collage—as Bashir employs a similar back-and-forth of deep research and first-person exploration against collage-phrases, but one set as a larger and singular ongoing structure. Bashir writes a shifting font and font-size, writing straight and narrow and impossibly large, providing a layering of text and volume as well as image, everything collaged together to provide a far broader experience of reading; of experiencing the text-as-performance, and the performance as absolute. 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.

GREENWICH MEANS

pressured
forced — shoved
from what is to
what should 

enemy of presence
carrier of stress
illness delivery system 

like something that came
with slavery like a lie
we insist on 

an old tomorrow
another yesterday 

not always on time not always
when called not
an appointment 

anti-response to presence

opposite
o’clock