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Field Theories
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?"
- GenresPoetry
109 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2017
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444 people want to read
About the author
Samiya Bashir
13 books86 followersReach out to connect!
Samiya Bashir is represented by Blue Flower Arts.
blueflowerarts.com || anya@blueflowerarts.com || 619-944-9247
Sometimes Samiya Bashir makes poems of dirt. Sometimes zeros and ones. Sometimes variously rendered text. Sometimes light. Her work has been widely published, performed, installed, printed, screened, experienced, and Oxford comma’d.
Bashir’s most recent book of poetry, Field Theories, wends its way through quantum mechanics, chicken wings and Newports, love and a shoulder’s chill, melding blackbody theory (idealized perfect absorption, as opposed to the whitebody’s idealized reflection) with real live Black bodies in poems that span lyric, narrative, dramatic, and multi-media experience, engaging their containers while pushing against their constraints.
“Samiya Bashir challenges the vocabulary of science, finding inflections and echoes within that vocabulary of the long and brutal history of race and racially based economic exploitation in the U.S.A. dynamic, shape-shifting machine of perpetual motion,” wrote Marcella Durand for Hyperallergic.
Albert Murray said, “the second law of thermodynamics ain’t nothing but the blues.” Field Theories asks what is the blue of how we treat each other, ourselves, of what this world does to us, of what we do to this shared world in poems which “creat[ing] cognitive openings,” wrote Durand, “for understanding how science, history, life and poetry intersect.”
During the six months leading up to the release of Field Theories, Bashir created six short videopoems in collaboration with video artist Roland Dahwen Wu (Patua Films) and dancer Keyon Gaskin (Physical Education) to remix and reimagine the work through a new medium: sound + image + light.
Norse gods, Ghanaian call and response, and black gospel all contribute to an exploration of the sensual world in Gospel, her second collection which, along with Where the Apple Falls was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Blackademics reviewer Alexis Pauline Gumbs described the collection as a “close look at the infinite places and moments when the human body meets despair, pleasure and transcendence.” Bashir is also editor of Best Black Women’s Erotica II, and co-editor of Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social & Political Black Literature & Art, with Tony Medina and Quraysh Ali Lansana.
Bashir holds a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, where she served as Poet Laureate, and an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she received two Hopwood Poetry Awards. In October 2017 she was awarded the Regional Arts & Culture Council’s Individual Artist Fellowship in Literature in recognition of individual artistic achievement and excellence to sustain and enhance her creative process. She has been the recipient of numerous other awards, grants, fellowships, and residencies, and is a founding organizer of Fire & Ink, an advocacy organization and writer’s festival for LGBT writers of African descent.
She has collaborated with a number of visual and media artists on projects such as M A P S :: a cartography in progress, with Roland Dahwen Wu, Coronagraphy with Tracy Schlapp, and Bashir has collaborated on a number of multimedia poetry and art projects including M A P S :: a cartography in progress, and Silt, Soot, and Smut, with Alison Saar, both of which travel the country in exhibition and performance. Bashir has most recently collaborated with Saar and Schlapp on Hades D.W.P., a forthcoming limited edition artists’ book.
Formerly a long-time communications professional focused on editorial, arts, and social justice movement building, Bashir now lives in Portland, Oregon, with a magic cat who shares her love of trees and blackbirds, and who occasionally crashes her classes and poetry salons at Reed College.
Samiya Bashir is represented by Blue Flower Arts.
blueflowerarts.com || anya@blueflowerarts.com || 619-944-9247
Sometimes Samiya Bashir makes poems of dirt. Sometimes zeros and ones. Sometimes variously rendered text. Sometimes light. Her work has been widely published, performed, installed, printed, screened, experienced, and Oxford comma’d.
Bashir’s most recent book of poetry, Field Theories, wends its way through quantum mechanics, chicken wings and Newports, love and a shoulder’s chill, melding blackbody theory (idealized perfect absorption, as opposed to the whitebody’s idealized reflection) with real live Black bodies in poems that span lyric, narrative, dramatic, and multi-media experience, engaging their containers while pushing against their constraints.
“Samiya Bashir challenges the vocabulary of science, finding inflections and echoes within that vocabulary of the long and brutal history of race and racially based economic exploitation in the U.S.A. dynamic, shape-shifting machine of perpetual motion,” wrote Marcella Durand for Hyperallergic.
Albert Murray said, “the second law of thermodynamics ain’t nothing but the blues.” Field Theories asks what is the blue of how we treat each other, ourselves, of what this world does to us, of what we do to this shared world in poems which “creat[ing] cognitive openings,” wrote Durand, “for understanding how science, history, life and poetry intersect.”
During the six months leading up to the release of Field Theories, Bashir created six short videopoems in collaboration with video artist Roland Dahwen Wu (Patua Films) and dancer Keyon Gaskin (Physical Education) to remix and reimagine the work through a new medium: sound + image + light.
Norse gods, Ghanaian call and response, and black gospel all contribute to an exploration of the sensual world in Gospel, her second collection which, along with Where the Apple Falls was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Blackademics reviewer Alexis Pauline Gumbs described the collection as a “close look at the infinite places and moments when the human body meets despair, pleasure and transcendence.” Bashir is also editor of Best Black Women’s Erotica II, and co-editor of Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social & Political Black Literature & Art, with Tony Medina and Quraysh Ali Lansana.
Bashir holds a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, where she served as Poet Laureate, and an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she received two Hopwood Poetry Awards. In October 2017 she was awarded the Regional Arts & Culture Council’s Individual Artist Fellowship in Literature in recognition of individual artistic achievement and excellence to sustain and enhance her creative process. She has been the recipient of numerous other awards, grants, fellowships, and residencies, and is a founding organizer of Fire & Ink, an advocacy organization and writer’s festival for LGBT writers of African descent.
She has collaborated with a number of visual and media artists on projects such as M A P S :: a cartography in progress, with Roland Dahwen Wu, Coronagraphy with Tracy Schlapp, and Bashir has collaborated on a number of multimedia poetry and art projects including M A P S :: a cartography in progress, and Silt, Soot, and Smut, with Alison Saar, both of which travel the country in exhibition and performance. Bashir has most recently collaborated with Saar and Schlapp on Hades D.W.P., a forthcoming limited edition artists’ book.
Formerly a long-time communications professional focused on editorial, arts, and social justice movement building, Bashir now lives in Portland, Oregon, with a magic cat who shares her love of trees and blackbirds, and who occasionally crashes her classes and poetry salons at Reed College.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
August 10, 2017
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.
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.
November 7, 2024
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!!
September 24, 2016
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.
October 16, 2017
Captivated from the beginning all the way to the end.
February 2, 2024
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.
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.
June 5, 2025
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.
December 11, 2018
This book made me start reading poetry again. I highly recommend it.
January 21, 2019
I love the conceit of poems as theories, and especially the crown of John Henry sonnets.
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December 6, 2019811.6 B2999f 2017
November 18, 2021
"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/
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/
April 21, 2022
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. :/
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews