"[ I Hope This Helps] builds a portal . . . the collaborators and collaboration itself are everything. It wrecked me." Douglas Kearney, BOMB
"I Hope This Helpsa title I wish I thought ofis a formal field day of genre-bending innovation. This book is Bashirs magnum opus." Jericho Brown
"Bashir presents a multimedia experience that captures the fractured contemporary moment in dynamic poems of wit, clarity, rage, and sorrow. . . This stirring volume deserves a wide audience." Publishers Weekly
"[ I Hope This Helps] combines poetry, essays, art, photography, I mean every page is a surprise visually and I really love that." Saeed Jones, Vibe Check Podcast
"Just flipping through the pages of this book makes my brain light up, because no two pages look alikeor sound alike, based on what I heard at Bashir's recent book launch. Give me that variety, that playfulness, and also the intention behind this work: to help us navigate these trying times." Evie Shockley, Academy of American Poets Newsletter
"Samiya Bashirs 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 registerssomething has been created. Something has been created titled I Hope This Helps.This readers answer: It does." Diane Seuss
"I Hope This Helps is experimental writing in the best sense. Bashir bends form as if physics doesnt apply to poetry. . . She insists, Im not saying Im a prophet, but after devouring her heavenly dream-song of a book, the rest of us might name her one instead." Erin Vachon, The Rumpus
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
"A thrilling fourth collection . . . With active experiments in time, font, and voice, Bashir assuredly takes on geography as a function and proves that the poet never stops moving, gifting confidences and realities in that process." Poetry Northwest
"What do we do to live and thriveas Black people, joyous and queer, new neighbors and strangers, our full humanitydwarfed in the shadows by towers of power, distraction, and fear? Bashirs poetry leans into these questions using her superpowerpausing to listenover-hearing and hearing overhearing under and re-writing, reinscribing her Journeythrough the twinkle textured disco ball Jenga setand shows the reader how creative power fuels us to begin again. And again." Erica Hunt "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."rob mclennan
