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.

I Hope This Helps

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.

Samiya Bashir

Price: $18.95

ISBN: 9781643622729

Paperback: 144 pages, 6 x 9 in

Publication Date: May 13, 2025

:: Praise ::

This book is Bashir’s magnum opus

-Jericho Brown

I Hope this Helps presents readers with a kind of Samiya-Bashirian Ode, teeming with lucid music, candid witness and radical play. These poems blend levity and gravity, joy and sadness; they meld genres of memoir, essay and art. The Bashirian Ode is a testament of inner and outer empathy: the ways we study and care for ourselves and others. I Hope This Helps is akin to an illustrated, illuminated guidebook, a lantern of language for surviving dark times.

-Terrance Hayes

Samiya Bashir’s I Hope This Helps is exuberant, choreographed cartography, improvisational typography, each page carrying the prints of a real human being/s, collaborative, lost-and-found, ekphrasis until it must bleed into real linotype. I read Samiya Bashir and it registers—something has been created. Something has been created titled I Hope This Helps. This reader’s answer: It does.

-Diane Seuss

I Hope This Helps is a map that shapeshifts with each reading. Beheld, it holds, beholds the “meaning of a moment like ours.”

-Jen Bervin

What do we do to live and thrive—as Black people, joyous and queer, new neighbors and strangers, our full humanity—dwarfed in the shadows by towers of power, distraction, and fear? Bashir’s poetry leans into these questions using her superpower—pausing to listen—over-hearing and hearing over—“hearing” under and re-writing, reinscribing her Journey—through the “twinkle textured disco ball Jenga set”—and shows the reader how creative power fuels us to begin again. And again.

-Erica Hunt

A genre-bending beacon and everything we need right now.

-Jacqueline Woodson