Field Theories

by Samiya Bashir

Field Theories wends its way through quantum mechanics, chicken wings, Newports, and love, melding blackbody theory (idealized perfect absorption vs. the whitebody s idealized reflection) with live Black bodies. Woven through experimental lyrics is a heroic crown of sonnets that wonders about love, intent, identity, hybridity, and how we embody these interstices. These poems span lyric, narrative, dramatic, and multi-media experience, engaging their containers while pushing against their constraints. Albert Murray said, The second law of thermodynamics ain t nothin but the blues. So what is the blue of how we treat each other, ourselves, and the world, and of how the world treats us?"

Genres: Poetry

109 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2017

About the author

Reach out to connect! Samiya Bashir is represented by:

Kelsey Day @ The Aragi Agency
Kelsey@Aragi.net
www.Aragi.net

/and/

Leslie Shipman @ The Shipman Agency
Leslie@TheShipmanAgency.com
www.TheShipmanAgency.com

Samiya Bashir is a poet, librettist, performer, multimedia artist, and author of four poetry collections, including I Hope This Helps, and Field Theories (2018 Oregon Book Award and Pushcart Prize winner). Her editorial work includes the forthcoming 30th Anniversary re-issue of June Jordan’s Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint (Haymarket, 2026). Her artwork has been exhibited and performed internationally.

Bashir is a sought-after creative coach and teacher with recent appointments at Columbia University and the University of Michigan. Among her many honors are the Pushcart Prize and the Rome Prize for Literature. She lives in Harlem.

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a pretty interesting collection, incorporating the kind of physics tricks you might expect from the title with black experience in interesting and illuminating ways-- so, for example, there are some poems that are about dark matter, but that also gestures toward blackness. And there's a particularly cool sequence including John Henry and his wife Polly Ann.

The poems here are formally playful, some even typographically odd (like one poem where white dots don't completely conceal some words, and other poems employ erasure, etc). Bahsir writes prose blocks, couplets, and freer verse forms as well. I think the poems I liked best were those that explored syntax-- some of the poems felt like they were more scattered phrases, repeated and inverted, but I liked those better where the sentence was something Bashir played with; it made the connections richer and more developed to me.

A rich and strange collection.

[emi · Rating 5 out of 5]

i learned so much from samiya during a poetry workshop at the fine arts work center over the summer. she is such a wonderful, vibrant, incredibly intelligent person so deeply in tune with the world, and her work reflects that!!

[D.A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

To read Samiya Bashir’s poetry is to be pulled up by a force so intense and magnetic as to constitute a new field of action: dark matter and radiation, witness and redaction, and the pendulum of time and history, swinging, swinging. I am reminded of Melvin Tolson’s description of the night on which that legendary steel-driver John Henry was born: 'an ax of lightning split the sky.' This book splits the sky right open, swinging like a melody, swinging like a boxer, swinging on each elemental and freighted word to beat the devil.

[Ashley Wolpers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Captivated from the beginning all the way to the end.

[Angela · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars (read for class)

The John Henry sonnet crown in this collection was the stand-out for me. I hesitate to call poetry “experimental” because that is maybe just shorthand for “I was too lazy to try to find an entrance into the poem.” The poems that I was able to find my footing in though were super cool, and I think this is a collection I would return to. The use of language is so good that I want to continue putting in the word to chip away and find my relationship to these poems.

[Venneh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great poetry collection that focuses on Black experience as framed by physics theories, and a neat recurring poem that looks at the story of John Henry as framed through the Orpheus myth. Lovely commute read.

[Nina · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book made me start reading poetry again. I highly recommend it.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love the conceit of poems as theories, and especially the crown of John Henry sonnets.

[Mills College Library]

811.6 B2999f 2017

[hh · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

[Hilary · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Remember love? / How it loosed its jaw to our kisses? / How it unhinged us? How it tried us / like so many keys like so many rusted / locks? How it missed its target despite its / kicking? How maybe its force could kill us?"

Let's just appreciate for a second how these words by Samiya Bashir in her poem "Second Law" perfectly describe the experience of being touched and wounded by love—how loving someone has a tendency towards chaos, as defined by the second law of thermodynamics.

Or, (can we also appreciate) how she depicts moments of passion in "Synchronous Rotation": "Let's / emit this fit of heat / before we burn. / Or let's burn." Love, described as an intense longing, can be seen as two entities locked onto one another and synchronized in orbit, like the earth and the moon.

Most of Bashir's poems in her collection FIELD THEORIES draw upon a complex mix of physics and a deep analysis of humankind in this way, creating a unique emotional experience for the reader. I spent some time searching up some of the theories that often accompanied as the poems' titles and was usually rewarded for careful readership. Bashir's poetry also touches upon race, womanhood, and Black history and lore, including a fascinating set of exchanges between legend John Henry and his wife Polly. But even if you don't feel like sifting through Wikipedia articles to concoct an amateur understanding of physics and historical figures (unless, of course, you are already familiar with the concepts), the feeling is there. You can read Bashir's poems, not fully understand all the words together, but completely understand how you are supposed to be feeling when reading them.

Full review: https://www.instagram.com/p/CWRFXOtPiUu/

[Saeda Marwan · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was good in the beginning but I think I'm in the wrong headspace for it. I want to give it another chance in a few days or so but for now I'll set it to the side. :/

[Johnny · Rating 5 out of 5]

outside a lady told us, among other things, her ass, like life, is lumpy and I agreed. page 15: a reason, amongst beauties, a diagram, an observation. alight.