I Hope This Helps

By Samiya Bashir

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1643622722
• ISBN13: 9781643622729
• Release Date: May 2025
• Publisher: Nightboat Books
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.9" x 8.9"